Panoramas of England

Előszó

'uffins marry their burrows. Or at least tliey do for the four or five weeks _every year they spend on land. For the rest of their lives they float about, quite alone, on the waters of the North Atlantic. But every spring the puflins return to the colony that bred them. For a few days they do not actu- ally Ily up on to the land. Instead, in huge, squawking rafts, they hold a party 011 the sea, having for this brief. libertarian moment in an otherwise rather straitened existence an utterly promiscuous time, ílirting with and seducing an almost endless succession of partners. There is no establishment of steady mates, no sign of loyalty or love. The bays and channels off the coast of the colony provide for a day or two the most generous of water beds. Then the great change: the puflins go ashore, flying up 011 to the grassy slopes that are pockmarked with their burrows. They always return to the burrow they occupied the previous year, and so of course the previous year's couples, which hadn't featured in the puffin imagination while out at sea - no pufiin can, apparently, teli the difference between other puflins - find themselves reasseinbling. In this way puffin marriages remain constant for life, not because they are loyal to each other but because they are both loyal to their place, to that little, rather dirty hole dug a couple of feet into llie hillside. Every puffin, in fact, marries a tiny bit of landscape which another pufiin happens to have marricd too. And so they breed. Home is the great bond of puffin society. When the need for home disappears and the chick is successfuily bred and fed, the puffins disperse, forget each other and their children, and think of nothing but their winter-long isolation adrift on the ocean until the moment comes the following year when the need for home reintroduces them to their wives. lt occurs to nte that the beautiful and captivating photographs in this book are something like our burrow. They are the places that unité us. Almost without exception, they are pictures of the supremely known. the elements of a version of England which, if we were incarcerated in a dank, hostile, ftíreign gaol, might float up in our daydreams as images not exactly of release and freedom but of return and reacceptance into the things with which we felt at home. They are pictures of the places to which the English are married. The right word is 'we'. This is the landscape of the first person plural. They are not, on the whole, depictions of the Wordsworthian sublime or Byronic isolation - nothing as brave or extreme as that, not Romantic in that sensebut of a deeply shared, and pcrhaps deeply needed, sense of comfort. The landscape which together these pictures create in the mind - and of course we know as we look at them they are no, true to the real state of the country. that hey are the most obvious of selective fictions - is really nothing more tl.an the national sofa: old, lamiliar, recept.ve. rounded and, above .11 our. Vissza

Fülszöveg

P H O E N I X Far-reaching views from hilltops, villages nestling in broad valleys, or cornfields glittering with wild flowers stretching into the far distance, here is a collection of classic images of England - all uncurtailed by the normál restraints of the artificial eye. Using a special formát camera photographer Nick Meers has been able to capture on film a view only previously achieved by the broad canvases of landscape painters.The panoramic camera provides a fresh perspective on those traditional images of England - from the village Street to the manor house, from the blue seas and hidden coves of Cornwall to the fens and fiat lands of East Anglia, from the Cumbrian lakes to the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head. Adam Nicolson is the author of the National Trust Book of Long Walks, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels, Prospects of England and Frontiers, which won the Somerset Maughan Award. A successful travel journalist he has written for the New York Times, Granta and the Sunday Times as well as publishing a collection of his articles for the Sunday Times in Adam Nicolson's Book of Walks. Nick Meers specializes in travel and landscape photography worldwide. In addition to his regular assignments for the National Trust, his work has appeared in Country Life, House and Garden, the Observer and the Telegraph magaziné. His books include űve Shell Guides, The Spirit of the Cotswolds, Enigmatic England and Panoramas of English Gardens. Vissza