Landscape, from a naïve viewpoint, is a sector of reality ‘out there’. It is made up of fields and buildings. Yet it is not a bounded entity as a tree or a building is. Nor does landscape mean simply a functional or legal unit such as a farm or a township. Landscape, like culture, is elusive and difficult to describe in a phrase. What is culture and how does one delimit a culture area? The contents of culture can be itemised, although if one is meticulous the list threatens to grow to interminable length. Culture is not such a list. Landscape, likewise, is not to be defined by itemising its parts. The parts are subsidiary clues to an integrated image. Landscape is such an image, a construct of mind and of feeling.

There are a few old pieces I've written from time to time, about that region, and my first idea was to collect those and add more. It all came up when my Uncle came to stay with me — last of my mother's family except for a much younger Aunt, and a living archive of the Calder Valley, a really remarkable and eloquent fellow, mill-owner and the lot, and very close to me. His whole life at the end — in his eighties — was recounting the life of the whole region.