I share your struggle, especially after hearing some of the things Kester has said. I’m suspicious of the understanding that’s come down from DH Lawrence via Woodstock that the (post)industrialised and urban is bad, artificial and dystopian compared to the ‘natural’ world - whatever that is - but I can’t let go of the sense that there is something in the message that we get from grass and trees and flowers and cliffs and rocks and animals that opens a window to and stirs awe about the magnitude of the creativity of a divine Creator, which allows us to deduce other things about his character and attributes, eg he not only creates but sustains the world. And yet see that it’s unhelpful when we look at the managed and scarred landscapes we call the countryside and think that when we go for a walk we’re somehow getting back to ‘the garden’. Is there something valuable in recognising the greater complexity that’s gone into the creation of a single ant compared to the production of a tower block or even a city?

For me, there is something very special about the solitude of looking at a huge landscape, and realising that I am just a very small part. As an example, it has been a joy to watch the soaring landscapes of the Lake District on television (in tribute to A A Wainright), even though we are looking at what is, in most cases, at best a managed landscape, and at worst the aftermath of industrial processes. Yet something in my heart soars whenever I see the hills, a river, even a large puddle! Merely a conditioned response? I don't think so - more a connection with the divine.

Good discussion; my eyes were opened to the 'unnatural' character of most of the British countryside when I did a short course based on a study of W. G. Hoskins' masterpiece, The Making of the English Landscape. It's one of those books which when it appeared, just did not fit into any existing categories, because it broke completely new ground. Or, to be more accurate, what Hoskins did was to go over old ground - the ground we tread on daily - in a lot of detail, investigating just how it got to be the way it was. His work was the consequence of a lifetime spent walking the hills and lanes of his native Devon and the Midlands where he lectured, asking questions of them: what created those ridges and furrows, why are those fields the shape they are, are those woods 'natural' (and what does that actually mean)? As Phil rightly says, the countryside is managed. Just as the town is. There's a lot to be said for aesthetics, of course, and I love a good mountain or sea view as much as anyone; but my breath is also taken by a great cityscape or even a not so great one but one where humanity is interacting with the urban environment creatively. You can feel as small and alone (in both good and bad ways) in a city as on a mountain. And connect with the divine in a supermarket car park as in a bright field. We create problems for ourselves by imposing an hierarchy of aesthtics which puts one (sort of) location above another; that's what creates those misguided notions of 'escape' to 'better places' Kester rightly critiques. Hoskins wasn't immune to this: 'Overspill,' Hoskins wrote, 'is a word as beastly as the thing it describes.' But I've just spent two very rich days in two of Hull's most edgy overspill areas and I know that their occupants would disagree with the polemical Hoskins on his view of their housinjg estate. The investigative Hoskins, though, gives us a lot of resources for learning more about our place - recommened.