The Beauty of Britain

The Beauty of Britain

J.B. Priestley

The beauty of our country -- or at least all of it south of the Highlands -- is as hard to define as it is easy to enjoy. Remembering other and larger countries, we see at once that one of its charms is that it is immensely varied within a small compass. We have here no vast mountain ranges, no illimitable plains, no leagues of forest, and are deprived of the grandeur that may accompany these things. But we have superb variety. A great deal of everything is packed into little space. I suspect that we are always faintly conscious of the fact that this is a smallish island, with the sea always round the corner. We know that everything has to be neatly packed into a small space. Nature, we feel, has carefully adjusted things -- mountains, plains, rivers, lakes -- to the scale of the island itself. A mountain 12,000 feet high would be a horrible monster here, as wrong as a plain 400 miles long, a river as broad as the Mississippi. In America the whole scale is too big, except for aviators. There is always too much of everything.

There you find yourself in a region that is all mountains, then in another region that is merely part of one colossal plain. You can spend a long, hard day in the Rockies simply traveling up or down one valley. You can wander across prairie country that has the desolating immensity of the ocean. Everything is too big; there is too much of it.

Though the geographical features of this island are comparatively small, and there is astonishing variety almost everywhere, that does not mean that our mountains are

not mountains, our plains not plains. Consider the Lake District. You can climb with ease -- as I have done many a time -- several of its mountains in one day. Nevertheless, you feel that they are mountains and not mere hills -- as a correspondent pointed out in The Times recently. This same correspondent told a story that proves my point. A party of climbers imported a Swiss guide into the Lake District; and on the first morning, surveying the misty, jagged peaks before him, he pointed to a ledge about two thirds of the way up and suggested that the party should spend the night there. He did not know that that ledge was only an hour or two’s journey away and that before the light went they would probably have conquered two or three of these peaks. He had not realized the scale of the country. He did not know that he was looking at mountains in miniature. What he did know was that he was certainly looking at mountains, and he was right, for these peaks, some of them less than 3,000 feet high, have all the air of great mountains.

My own favourite country, perhaps because I knew it as a boy, is that of the Yorkshire Dales. For variety of landscape, these Dales cannot be matched in this island or anywhere else. A day’s walk among them will give you almost everything fit to be seen on this earth. Within a few hours, you have enjoyed the green valleys, with their rivers, fine old bridges, pleasant villages, hanging woods, smooth fields; and then the moorland slopes, with their rushing streams, stone walls, salty winds and white farmhouses; and then the lonely heights, which seem to be miles above the ordinary world. Yet less than an hour in a fast motor will bring you to the middle of some manufacturing town.

Another characteristic of our landscape is its exquisite moderation. It looks like the

result of one of those happy compromises that make our social and political plans so irrational and yet so successful. It has been born of a compromise between wildness and tameness, between Nature and Man. In many countries you pass straight from regions where men have left their mark on every inch of ground to other regions that are desolate wildernesses. Abroad, we have all noticed how abruptly most of the cities seem to begin: here, no city; there, the city. With us the cities pretend they are not really there until we are well inside them. They almost insinuate themselves into the countryside. This comes from another compromise of ours, the suburb. There is a great deal to be said for the suburb. To people of moderate means, compelled to live fairly near their work in a city, the suburb offers the most civilized way of life. Nearly all Englishmen are at heart country gentlemen. The suburban villa enables the salesman or the clerk, out of hours, to be almost a country gentleman. (Let us admit that it offers his wife and children more solid advantages.) A man in a newish suburb feels that he has one foot in the city and one in the country. As this is the kind of compromise he likes, he is happy.

We must return, however, to the landscape, which I suggest is the result of a compromise between wildness and cultivation, Nature and Man. One reason for this is that it contains that exquisite balance between Nature and Man. We see a cornfield and a cottage, both solid evidences of Man’s presence. The fence and the gate are man-made, but are not severely regular and trim as they would be in some other countries. The trees and hedges, the grass and wild flowers in the foreground, all suggest that Nature has not been dragooned into obedience. Even the cottage, which has an irregularity and coloring that make it fit snugly into the landscape (as all good cottages should do), looks nearly as much a piece of natural history as the trees: you

feel it might have grown there. In some countries, that cottage would have been an uncompromising cube of brick which would have declared, “No nonsense now. Man, the drainer, the tiller, the builder, has settled here.” In this English scene there is no such direct opposition. Men and trees and flowers, we feel, have all settled down comfortably together. The motto is, “Live and let live.” This exquisite harmony between Nature and Man explains in part the enchantment of the older Britain, in which whole towns fitted snugly into the landscape and it was impossible to say where cultivation ended and wild life began. It was a country rich in trees, birds, and wild flowers, as we can see to this day.