

The eeriness of the English countryside - Thevet
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane

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tshadwell
I read 2/3 or so of this article, and skimmed the rest. I'm not really sure
what the article is meant to mean. I'm English, half of my life was spent in
Cornwall and Devon on-and-off with my family, so I was expecting the article
to reveal something I hadn't noticed about the English country landscape that
suddenly allows it to be framed as eerie.

Instead, the article begins with a novel that overwrites the landscape with
binoculars to superimpose an eerie subscript, then appears to meander for the
entire length of the article on works and commentaries on some structures in
England that could be said to be Eerie and some people who found the
countryside eerie, usually for their own reasons.

The primary thrust, halfway through the article appears to be that there are a
body of works that paint the English landscape as eerie, but it fails to
really explain at all /why/ the English landscape should be more eerie than
other landscapes.

As I see it, great horror takes something that is known well and withers it
into something that crescendos to the macabre, but this article fails to
justify why the English countryside should be any more a target for this than
any other landscape; English people will write horror stories in the world
they inhabit. The Scarecrows[1] is a great example I read when I was younger
of an eerie psychological ghost story set in the English countryside.

I'd like to know what others saw in this article.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarecrows)

~~~
mcphage
> it fails to really explain at all /why/ the English landscape should be more
> eerie than other landscapes.

The issue isn't whether the English countryside is more eerie than other
landscapes—it's not, obviously, since ghosts aren't real; every countryside is
equally mundane.

Instead, the question of the article is to ask why people write about the
eerie in conjunction with the English countryside. And that the article does
address—it's used as a metaphor for things that are pretty and peaceful on the
surface, but which hide unpleasant details and histories:

Some excerpts:

> What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this
> unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase
> of severe environmental damage.

> Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another
> trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of
> capital.

> Contemporary eerie culture is also drawn to the military and security
> infrastructure that occupies much of England’s land and air space, from
> Salisbury Plain to Otterburn to Foulness. This dispersed geography of
> conflict and surveillance has attracted the interests of ...

> Yet state surveillance is no longer testified to in the landscape by giant
> edifices. Instead it is mostly carried out in by software programs running
> on computers housed in ordinary-looking government buildings, its sources
> and effects – like all eerie phenomena – glimpsed but never confronted.

etc, etc.

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mattbee
Relevant: "Sir, You Are Being Hunted" is a weird, hard FPS featuring a
"British countryside generator" to build its landscapes. I played an early
version and it had that whole MR James vibe (though with robots)
[http://www.big-robot.com/2012/03/12/sir-you-are-being-
hunted...](http://www.big-robot.com/2012/03/12/sir-you-are-being-hunted/)

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ZanyProgrammer
I wonder how much of this eeriness is due to the overwhelmingly Protestant and
secular nature of English society that yearns for the mysterious in any which
way it can.

And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was
Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?

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jeffbr13
The frequent puns wouldn't have been so appalling if the author didn't
figuratively "take a breath" on the page, and point them out every. single.
time.

