We think we know the Romantic countryside; it has become the stuff of cliche. Here, renowned biographer and poet Fiona Sampson explores how Romanticism shaped the British countryside and our attitudes to it,via series of ten walks through the British landscape, punctuated by the author's vivid and personal reflections.
[QUOTE FROM BOOK]
The Romantics are imperfect guides to the British countryside: but guides - and extollagers - they are all the same. Whether well-known or obscure, as they walked, observed, settled, travelled and retreated, engineered and ate, colonised and mapped and tried to define the rural environment, these protagonists encountered it not as a well-thumbed gazetteer of the places they might make famous, but with revelatory freshness. And so with these ten walks I want to retrieve Shelley's lovely, lilting phrase, 'Hopes of high talk with the departed dead,' from its sceptical context in 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'.
I'm walking as if to catch up with the Romantics: if not for 'high talk', at least for some of the gossip of witness. Way-finders, they go ahead of me through my familiar landscapes - railway embankments, woodland walks, parks at dusk - like stars glimpsed through the branches of a wood.
