Landskipping by Anna Pavord review – why we should not treat the countryside as a theme park

This varied book – part memoir, part history, part polemic – investigates why there are some places we love best and considers the future of the British landscape

If I were asked to describe James Ward’s 1814 painting Gordale Scar, I’d launch straight in with exclamations about the height of the limestone cliffs, the deep shadow in the ravine, the sense of the earth shuddering, the theatre of it: the sublime. But then, as Anna Pavord points out in her rangey, deeply felt and sometimes luminous book about our responses to landscape, there’s the bull. Lord Ribblesdale, who commissioned the picture, wanted to celebrate his prize herd and great white bull as much as the dramatic topography of his estate. And the bull is, frankly, just as likely to produce feelings of terror in walkers on the East Malham estate.

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