Abstract
Where countries in the previous chapter use natural landscapes as the core of their chose identity, the focus of this chapter is on how countries use historical man-made landscape, connected to stories of agriculture, (local) food and a long-term connection of people to the land. For the suggested old and stable agrarian landscapes, open-air museums and folk music are used as points of reference.
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Notes
- 1.
The gastronomic French meal was inscribed in UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010 (Mandelblatt, 2012, p. 158). The relationship between food and landscape is rarely mentioned (see, for example, Ichijo & Ranta, 2016; Leerssen, 2006; Pilcher, 2012; Porciani, 2020), but is nonetheless important. See for example the European programme for geographical indications for food products, of which the Protected Designation of Origin is strongly related to landscape protection (De Pater et al., 2021).
- 2.
Lowenthal (1994, p. 21). Englishness is grounded in a set of recognisable topographic images (the white cliffs of Dover; the Yorkshire Dales; the Lake District; the Wessex chalk), and the rural archetype of nucleated villages set in a patchwork of meadows, fields and woodlands (Lowenthal, 1994, p. 20; Thomas, 2021).
- 3.
In the late Middle Ages, the settlement consisted of two villages, Wick Dive and Wick Hamon, both with a manor, a church and open fields. During the sixteenth century, the two villages merged, after which one of the churches was demolished in the eighteenth century and the open fields were enclosed in 1757 (‘Wicken’, in Riden & Insley, 2002, pp. 413–438).
- 4.
From the early nineteenth-century poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ by William Blake, turned into music by Parry in 1916 and orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar.
- 5.
- 6.
Nowadays, Ireland (the island as a whole) has 5 million inhabitants, most of whom live in towns. Before the potato crisis of the 1840s, it had a population of 8 million (only forty years earlier, England also had a population of 8 million) and was almost completely rural; in the time that followed, millions of men, women and children were forced to migrate.
- 7.
In this case, part of the context was the Civil War that had dominated Finnish society in the first years after independence and in which the upper class ‘White’ party had defeated the left-wing ‘Red’ party. The depiction of the country showed the ‘White’ world view (Jokela & Linkola, 2013).
- 8.
- 9.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy [accessed 12 February 2022].
- 10.
See for example the wish for autarky in Franco’s Spain (Del Arco Blanco & Gorostiza, 2021, p. 78).
- 11.
Billé (2014) even speaks of territorial phantom pains for countries that have lost territories.
- 12.
The relationship between music and nationalism is another underresearched theme in the literature on nationalism (Brincker, 2008).
- 13.
Paasi (2016, p. 24); Wikipedia Finlandia (Sibelius) [3 January 2021].
- 14.
Wikipedia Má vlast [3 January 2021].
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Renes, H. (2022). Timeless Agrarian Landscapes. In: Landscape, Heritage and National Identity in Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09536-8_4
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