THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS HAVE revealed the ‘unwitting autobiography’ of Ashdown's people and their landscape. Rich and poor have created the landscape, but people's lives were in turn influenced by their physical surroundings and attached meanings of the environment into which they were born or in which they made their living. Historically Ashdown's cottagers and small farmers were born into a hegemonic society in which the iconography of the wealthy was readily displayed: the plaques, memorials and interior or exterior furnishings of their parish church, for example, constantly reminding them of their own humble place within a highly stratified society. Work among the landscapes of farms, gardens and parks similarly reinforced their subservient relationship to the owners, and the manor house, schoolroom or almshouse would be unconsciously ‘read’ in the same way. They inherited attitudes to social place and obligation, but this is not to deny what Keith Snell has called ‘a culture of deferential bitterness’, a fierce undercurrent of protest and claims to ancient rights that we have charted and which were not so easily trampled.

The idea of landscape in relation to its inhabitants has a long history. John Ruskin was struck by the different attitudes to ‘natural beauty’ between classical and modern writers. The former preferred landscapes of tamed and humanised or gently productive nature, whereas for Ruskin's contemporaries nature might also be sublime – wild and rugged. And if such a landscape, even a mimetic one, could be found and enjoyed within a train's ride from London, so much the better. And not too wild a heath, but one shaped by the inhabitants of the scattered picturesque but mean cottages, by a kind of ‘primeval nobility’. This was an age when ‘cultural primitivism’ as a fashion attracted the wealthy and leisured. The very word ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846. Failing this, the countryside was to be innocent, pastoral and reflective, part of a critical counter-current to the anxieties of urbanisation and especially life in London.

The writing of Thomas Hardy, as we noted in Chapter 1, makes use of the character of a heathland environment, Egdon Heath, most particularly in The Return of the Native (1878), and by the later nineteenth century heathland had taken its place in the list of escapee environments for wealthy city dwellers.