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Landscape and the Writing of History in England, c.1870-1950

This paper considers the relationship between history-writing and affective, embodied, engagement with landscape. It is particularly concerned with G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962), one of the leading – and most prolific – historians of the early-mid twentieth century. Trevelyan was a keen walker and preservationist, being actively involved in the leadership of the National Trust and president of the Youth Hostels Association. For him, access to nature and the countryside was an important source of personal solace; he also saw it as important for the nation at large. His was an intensely patriotic agenda, and one that regarded the value of landscape as residing to a significant degree in its ‘associational’ value, particularly its continuity with the past. This is illustrated most strikingly by his lifelong engagement with the Northumbrian Border. Trevelyan’s emphasis on the continuity immanent in landscape, it will be argued, was consistent with a particular – and widely felt – relationship with modernity, and it is not one best characterised in antagonistic terms. Moreover, it was also connected with his practice as an historian – as indeed was his engagement with landscape more generally. Trevelyan’s on-foot appreciation of storied and beautiful places honed his powers of observation and underpinned his historical imagination. In this he was not alone. Indeed, his example points to the (generally neglected) importance of environmentalist sensibilities in shaping the ideas, methods and writing of a range of British historians between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. In order fully to understand history-writing in this period, we need to pay more attention to the influence of landscape.