A Fear of Nature - Images & Perceptions of Heath, Moor, Bog
& Fen in England
Ian D. Rotherham, Sheffield Hallam University
Macbeth - Scene 1. - A desert
Heath
‘When shall we
three meet again
In thunder lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won,
That will be ere the set of sun,
Where the place?
Upon the heath ………………. Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air’
William Shakespeare 1600’s
Today, fashions, art, science, transport and
communications all play significant roles in the emerging sense of place and
culture that now translate into the tourist landscape. These places are fearful
as waste and wilderness. Yet being far from the madding crowd these wild areas
draw the visitor to escape from the modern world to rejoin nature and the
cultural past. The reality may owe as much to fiction and careful packaging as
it does to nature and history. Hollywood and the Victorian writers for example,
draw visitors to the ancient heathland and Royal Forest of Sherwood as much as
by any real understanding of the nature and history of the area. The accounts
of travellers and commentators in Great Britain from the medieval to modern
times help set the scene for contemporary images and associations. Recent
research on the North Yorkshire Moors and Dales for the Yorkshire Tourist Board
showed how visitors were still adversely affected by images of the ‘Moors Murders’ (from the 1960s and a
totally different geographical location),
and even of the 1980s classic film ‘American
Werewolf in London’ , the opening scenes of which are set in a bleak North
Yorkshire moorland. However, visitors are also drawn to a place by fear and
association. So the late Victorian ‘Hound
of the Baskervilles’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, created both fear of the
place but also an irresistible attraction for future visitors to experience the
bleak and horrific scene of the book, Dartmoor.
Sherlock Holmes states that ‘………….. there rose out to the vast gloom of the moor
that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great
Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long,
deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then a sad moan in which it died away.’
In his diary Watson describes the ‘……. Bleak, cold, and shelterless moor’, and
states that ‘No one could find his way
into the Grimpen Mire tonight.’ Then he describes their way through the
bog: ‘……... green-scummed pits and foul
quagmires which barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy
water-plants sent an odour of decay and heavy miasmatic vapour into our faces,
whilst a false step plunged us more than once into the dark, quivering mire,
which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet. Its tenacious grip
plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it, it was as if some
malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so grim and
purposeful was the clutch in which it held us.’
Another Conan Doyle hero Brigadier Gerard describes
the landscape as: ‘It is a bleak place
this Dartmoor, wild and rocky - a country of wind and mist. I felt as I walked
that it is no wonder Englishmen should suffer from the spleen.’
Today, the scene is the Dartmoor National Park with
around ten million tourism visitors a year.
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This paper examines how snow
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the 20th century. The analysis integrates literary readings on exposure
to extreme weather (ca. 1940) with
other sources to follow the transformation of harsh weather conditions into development
opportunities for mountain tourism and wind farms.
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