Abstract

170 BOOK REVIEWS book has been structured, the reader is led from town to farmland and onwards into increas- ingly natural-seeming landscapes, from village to fields, arable to pasture to upland grazing, to the bare fells, from household to infield to outfield to ‘waste’, a transect through the medieval and early modern (and probably prehistoric) world. The chapters are subtitled topographically – for example, ‘The Vale of Lorton’ - but their main titles concern the progression of land use (Farmland and village, Common land) or character (Rock and water). The journey upstream is against time as well as gravity, moving us from 21st century Cockermouth back to medieval stock farms of the higher fells. The book is not slavishly chronological, of course, because in landscape time is entangled with itself, and the ‘permanence of place can collapse time’ (p. 245). In the final chapter, at the multiple origins of the river, time loops back to the present day, and to the climbers, ramblers and tourists who have become main users of the area. Here our author leaves us, whilst reminding us that timelessness in landscape is an illu- sion: as a visiting Scottish banker said in 1878, in praise