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.
> 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.
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...
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?
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.
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