Landscape and Place, an Enlargement of Consciousness

When I stand on the bank of the Severn estuary, and look out across that vast and beautiful landscape, I know that I am seeing this natural world through the eyes of the people who died a thousand years ago, and for a moment or two I succeed in engaging with the minds of the dead[1].

Place attachment is the way we relate, interact, experience and understand our relationship with our environment, our memory and our past[1]. It is important to understand why place attachment is so powerful, and to understand how Brian Waters uses the concepts of landscape in his book. We should also understand how place attachment is experienced through all of the senses, and how it fires our spatial awareness.

Spatial awareness has been confirmed by research on perception and shows us the link between the engagement of several senses and orientation or path finding[2]. Children, for example, do identify with place from ages of two to three years old.

Environmental psychologists also argue that as a psychological process ‘place attachment’ is similar to an infant’s attachment to parental figures. They go on to suggest that place attachment can develop social dimensions, as individuals develop ties to community. They then own land, and participate in the public life of a community[3].

Another interesting aspect about place is, owing to the spatial and multi-sensory way in which we experience ‘place’, it seems that we can instantly transport ourselves back in time and space: we have all experienced how the smell of a rose can convey us back to grandma’s garden[4]. Similarly, if we go to a ‘place’ we often find that memories otherwise
forgotten come flooding back.

This concept is something that Brain Waters makes capital on when describing places in the depth of detail he does, and can be seen by the amount of time he spent exploring the Severn estuary. This immersion of ‘place’ acts as a trigger – it is a powerful mnemonic device, giving us strong memory associations recovering memory, and unlocking the past [5].

---

[1]
Goksenin Inalhan. Edward Finch. Place attachment and sense of belonging. 2004.
Volume: 22 Issue: 5/6. p120–128.

[2]
http://consc.net/mindpapers/3.4b. Accessed 20 April 2010

[3]
Groth, Paul  Erling ; Bressi, Todd W. Understanding ordinary landscapes. 1998. Yale University Press.

[4]
Groth, Paul  Erling ; Bressi, Todd W. Understanding ordinary landscapes. 1998. Yale University Press. p131.

[5]
This concept of place attachment was constructed from notes taken at a lecture
about Place given by Kynan Genrty at Ruskin College.

---

[1]
Hoskins W G. The making of the English
Landscape. Penguin. 1985. p17.

A signature across the landscape

The Severn estuary has a rich source of artefacts from the past and people who are proud of their heritage; it has an abundance of objects from the past, most of which are associated with providing a living to thelocal people and their communities.

These artefacts, objects, skills and memories provided them with an identity and social background. Most of the traditional skills used on the Severn have only in recent years fallen into disuse, and therefore not yet gained historical value. Should we, as Brian Waters was, be concerned that we are at risk of losing these memories and with it a
way of life?

Public History

So what is Public History?

It is a term that describes a broad range of disciplines undertaken by people who have an understanding of history, but wish to work outside of the restraints of academic history. In
general, those of us who embrace the term public historian accept that the boundaries of the field are somewhat fluid and that its definition remains a work still evolving.

Ludmilla Jordanova writes eloquently when telling us that public history is:

All the means deliberate and otherwise, through which those who are not professional historians acquire their sense of the past^[1].

---

[1]
Jordanova, L. Public History Today.
2000 May pp. 20-21.

History

Like most people I did not like history as taught at School, but outside education
I always had a love of the past.

History can be built from layers of memory. It is history that gives us ‘our past’, ‘my past’, and ‘your past’. It is history and the past that gives us a culture, a social background, and sense of identity. It helps form our community structure. Memory can be recorded and passed down the generations not only in the form of written documentation, but in the form of acquired and learned skills, oral testimony (historians are story tellers) and
the memory associations connected with objects and artefacts.

Our Memories

Our memories can be a wonderful gift or a terrible scourge. They can cradle you in strands of silk or bind you in coils barbed wire[1].

---

[1]
Ready R, Burton K. Neuro-Linguistic
Programming for Dummies. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. West Sussex. England.
2004. p31.

Brian Waters

Brian Waters was an author, editor and a poet who in Severn Tide, told stories about the lives of the people who lived and worked on the river Severn.

Severn Tide describes the landscape with a poet’s eye and also includes some fascinating stories about some very interesting characters. Waters would visit these several times over a number of years, to build on his anecdotes, to develop a rich and factual based narrative about very ordinary people. I will use this blog make an argument that Waters style of writing embraces all of the basic disciplines of public history, and that his use of landscape, objects, people and their memories in the form of oral testimonies as the body
of his work, makes his historic writing engaging and informative.

Severn Tide provides for us this picture in great detail; therefore during the
course of this blog I will be retracing the steps of Waters with the aim of
making a critical analysis of his work, from a public history prospective, and
with a view to validating his finding to underpin my argument that Waters
should be thought of and remembered as a public historian.

The River Severn

This Blog is about a river, the Severn. It could be any river, but I have chosen the Severn because when I came to Ruskin College Oxford, I came with a passion, a passion about the river Severn.

My passion for the river Severn is fuelled by an author and a poet by the name of Brian Waters. Waters wrote several books about the river Severn and surrounding area, and also
published two books of poems. In 1947 Waters wrote a book called Severn Tide, telling anecdotal stories about his travels along the river Severn. He wrote about stories of the landscape, objects, people and their memories. In this blogI will argue that access to these memories are not only accessible though the conventional academic routes of well thumbed and quoted documents and manuscripts, but a richer and more engaging past can be accessed through application of the disciplines of public history, and how we can use public history as a way to unlock the past.