Secessio

Almost any village in the more remote parts of northern England, viewed from its surrounding moors and mountainsides, appears less as a settlement imposed upon a landscape than as a landscape that has, in a particular spot, condensed into a settlement. These villages seem to grow out of their surroundings, much as a weathered outcrop of rock might break the surface of a fellside, emerging from the land rather than imposing themselves upon it. This visual continuity, characteristic of England’s rural north, is born of centuries of building in local materials, for local needs, by people who had no reason to imagine that stone, timber, slate and landscape were discrete categories at all, but rather the same native language spoken in different forms.

     Before the arrival of mass transport and industrial building materials, a human settlement could only be built from materials that lay close to hand. In the Lake District this meant volcanic and slate rock – the grey-green Coniston and Westmorland slates that quarrymen split from the very fells the villages sit beneath. In the Dales it meant the pale, weathered limestone of the southern dale-heads and the darker gritstone of the moorland edges further north. A wall built from stone quarried a few hundred yards away does not merely resemble the hillside; geologically speaking, it is a rearrangement of the same material, still carrying the same mineral colour, the same tendency to lichen and weather in identical ways over identical decades.

     This is a point made by the historian W. G. Hoskins in his 1954 study The Making of the English Landscape, which traced the way vernacular buildings across England could be read almost as geological documents, their walls announcing the rock beneath the nearest hill. Hoskins treated the correspondence between a region’s buildings and its underlying strata as one of the most legible facts in the whole English landscape, and nowhere is that legibility sharper than in the northern uplands, where a village’s stone can rarely be mistaken for that of a valley even twenty miles away.

     In his Guide to the Lakes, first issued in expanded form in 1810, William Wordsworth offered an extended meditation on the region’s older farmhouses and cottages, arguing that their builders – untrained, unselfconscious, working from necessity rather than taste – had nonetheless produced buildings that seemed to belong to the ground on which they stood almost as naturally as trees or boulders. Wordsworth observed that these humble dwellings, roofed in the same slate that outcropped nearby and walled in stone barely altered from its native state, struck the attentive traveller less as objects of construction than as a kind of natural growth, an impression reinforced by the way lichen, moss and weather worked on new stone exactly as they worked on old. For Wordsworth, this was a commentary not so much on aesthetics as on vernacular building as an unconscious form of harmony – a harmony achieved precisely because no one was trying to achieve it, and because economic necessity, rather than design ambition, dictated every choice of material and form.

    Building materials explain texture and colour, but they do not account for form – the low profiles, the way roofs pitch to match the angle of the fell behind them, the manner in which a village clusters in a valley bottom or strings itself along a beck rather than spreading indiscriminately across open ground. Here the explanation lies in the practical logic of upland farming. Villages in this region were never planted according to an abstract plan; rather, they accreted around the points where valley floor met fellside, where a beck could be forded, where enough flat, drainable and reasonably sheltered ground existed to support a cluster of farmsteads. The drystone walls that radiate outward from almost every Dales village are working field systems and perform the same function architecturally that the villages themselves perform: they extend the built environment into the landscape by the same means, and in the same material, that the landscape uses to define itself.

    Alfred Wainwright, whose seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells remain probably the most closely observed topographical record of the region, repeatedly drew attention to this quality, noting how villages seen from the fell-tops he was mapping seemed to settle into folds of the ground rather than sit upon it, visually inseparable from the walls, becks and woodland around them.

    Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson, who spent his life in the slate-quarrying town of Millom, made a related observation from within the building trade itself, writing of local stone architecture as an art practised by people who thought of themselves as farmers or masons rather than as artists, and who consequently built without the self-consciousness that so often creates visual friction between structure and setting.

    The Lake District has, of course, radically changed since Wordsworth’s time. He himself passionately warned against the growing local trend toward painting houses white – a trend that two centuries later has now ruined this visual continuity across many parts of the district. Bright white houses, Wordsworth argued, act as visual disruptions that visually slice through the natural contours of mountains and valleys, destroying the sense of unity and scale: (“Five or six white houses,” he wrote, “scattered over a valley, by their obtrusiveness, dot the surface, and divide it into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye, and disturbing that repose which might otherwise be perfect.”) Such has been the unfortunate fate of many towns in the Lake District, although not hitherto in its remoter parts, nor elsewhere in the north, notably the Yorkshire Dales, whose villages and hamlets have remained largely unchanged for centuries. The harmony these villages achieve is, in the first instance, an accident of necessity: people built with what was near because nothing else was economically available. But the effect of that constraint, sustained across many generations and reinforced by planning controls within the modern National Parks, has been a landscape in which the human and the geological are visually continuous rather than opposed. In this sense, England’s rural north offers a rare and instructive case: proof that a landscape need not exclude human settlement to remain “natural” – and that architecture practised without ambition can sometimes achieve what architecture practised with ambition often fails to do: to disappear into the ground on which it stands.