Charles Jencks designed this beautiful landscape structure for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. It reminds me very much of the ridge and furrow fields near my house, and of course both are landscapes to be walked and used, rather than admired from afar. But at the same time, it is from afar that their true shapes become apparent.
Full story at the BBC Tuesday, 11 May, 2004, 23:41 GMT 00:41 UK
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Every shape here is the product of something else. The course of the stream is dictated by the geology. The smooth ridges and furrows of the field were created by a hundred years of strip-ploughing. The hedges planted by humans, their forms bitten around by animals. The narrow tracks created by the daily passing of cleft hooves. In the daytime this field looks like bright green corduroy seamed with hawthorn and hemmed by water. Beneath each row of hedging the ground is brown and dead, suffocated by the heat of heavy lanolined bodies dozing in the shade during the day and dreaming their way through the night. Occasionally a ewe or a lamb does not awake – and then scavengers come to remove its eyes, its intestines, and the other softer parts. Generations of flies, or a farmer and a tractor, will dispose of the rest.
