Caring for Landscapes at Flatford

How do you protect an iconic landscape? Landscapes in general cannot be listed or scheduled in the same way as built structures, and they can change rapidly as trees and plants grow and new features appear.   Caring for landscapes is therefore a challenge, yet they can be just as rich in meaning and significance as any building or monument.

 

View on the River Stour

Flatford in Suffolk is perhaps one of the most iconic landscapes in the world, despite (or perhaps because of) being such an intimate, local place. Here, John Constable learned his craft as a painter, and it is to this familiar corner of the Essex/Suffolk border that he returned again and again, even as he made his name in the metropolitan art world of the early nineteenth century.

 

Flatford Bridge Cottage

Constable was born in East Bergholt in1776, the second son of a wealthy local merchant, miller and farmer, whose fortune had enabled him to build a substantial mansion two years earlier. Flatford Mill was at the centre of Constable’s father’s business activities, and was therefore a place of business, trade and labour.

 

The Hay Wain (minus cart)

The beauty of the landscape in this part of Suffolk inspired in Constable a detailed, picturesque mode of painting that is now regarded as the very epitome of the English landscape painting tradition. His works line the walls of the National Gallery, Tate, V&A and other great galleries. So well known is Constable’s art, in fact, that this whole area of Suffolk takes his name – we call it ‘Constable Country’.

                        

Power lines crossing Constable Country - the cut in the trees now encourages nightingales

Flatford has a place in our national culture that far exceeds its local, domestic register. It has been visited by organised groups of tourists since at least the 1890s, eager to seek out the place that inspired the artist. As Stephen Daniels has observed, Constable Country has on many occasions served as a metaphorical index of the health of our relationships – with the countryside or indeed with the nation at large.

 

Kitchen garden at Valley Farm

Managing the different views and vantage points at Flatford is an interesting challenge. It is possible to take a tour with one of the excellent National Trust volunteer guides to compare prints of Constable’s paintings with the view of the real thing. More or less, the views remain similar. This is a direct result of the efforts that have been taken to protect this corner of Suffolk, now an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, by a wide range of organisations: the National Trust, the RSPB, the Field Studies Council, the River Stour Trust, the AONB and the County Council among them.

 

Where Constable's father built and maintained boats

At the same time, many of the views are now overgrown by comparison with the way Constable depicted them. Work is at hand to produce tree management plans, and to contemplate the potential removal of trees in order better to be faithful to the scenes that Constable depicted.

 

Signage (old school)

Icons are prone to being manipulated by others. Over the years, Constable’s most famous works have been re-used in a variety of contexts, from biscuit tins to anti-nuclear statements. One satirical treatment of Constable’s most famous work, the Hay-wain, was used to highlight the proliferation of signage appearing in the countryside in the 1920s.

 

A 1920s cartoon about signs in the countryside (after Constable's The Hay Wain)

I was pleased to see the rather stylish new National Trust signage now in place at Flatford on a recent visit. But the growth of signs today, as with that of trees, is being carefully managed to avoid unnecessary intrusion upon the landscape – even if this means, for now, just one fingerpost to direct visitors to the loos.

Stylish new signage

Orford’s mysteries: littoral drift meets literary drift

Suffolk is currently marketing itself as ‘The Curious County’ – quite right too, for the place is full of the most mysterious corners. Orford is one of these: a delightful coastal village where nothing is quite as it seems.

 

Pagoda at Orford Ness

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the National Trust taking on responsibility for Orford Ness (in 1993), and the centenary of its being taken over by the War Office (in 1913). The 6-mile shingle spit – known as an island to locals, and not without some measure of accuracy – runs from just below Aldeburgh in the north to a position level with the hamlet of Shingle Street in the south (itself the location of various reported wartime mysteries).

 

Orford Ness: both a natural and military landscape

The Ness is a geological marvel that rivals anything elsewhere in the UK. It is separated from the mainland by the river Alde, and is a unique example of the effects of longshore or littoral drift. The distinctive ridge-and-furrow patterning on the spit is one of the consequences of this natural phenomenon, formed by the interaction between tidal patterns and the fine-grained shingle.

...which means the lighthouse's days are now numbered

An ever-changing coastline at Orford Ness...

But while its natural history alone makes Orford Ness a site of immense fascination, its military uses from 1913 onwards have added more recent layers of intrigue. In World War One Orford Ness was used as an airbase by the Royal Flying Corps. In the 1920s and 30s it was deployed for experiments in radio communications and the development of radar. After the Second World War, it was used as an atomic weapons testing facility, specifically to test the performance of different elements of weapons systems in a variety of environmental conditions. It also continued to be used for radio communications, through the installation of Cobra Mist.

 

Bringing the property to life, MOD-style

There is so much to uncover about Orford Ness that a single visit is not enough. Give yourself a day, and book yourself onto a tour by one of the National Trust rangers there. The stories you will hear will be scarcely believable, and you may find yourself, like me, acquiring a copy of Paddy Heazell’s Most Secret: The Hidden History of Orford Ness to find out more.

 

Orford Ness: access now permitted thanks to National Trust

I made another discovery on a recent visit to Orford. Out of curiosity I popped into the parish church, and found a nice little exhibition about the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde there in 1958. Noye’s Fludde is a musical setting of a medieval mystery play based on the story of Noah’s ark. Britten wrote the piece specifically for young voices and for performance in a community setting like a church. He filled the score with strange percussion effects (to bring to life the sounds of shipbuilding, and the flood) and the performance involved children dressed as animals and the construction of the ark itself.

 

Benjamin Britten, autograph-signing for panda, fox and bear (Orford, 1958)

The premiere was a ‘curiously moving spiritual and musical experience’ wrote the Sunday Times’ reviewer in 1958, disturbing the ‘sleepy village of Orford near the Suffolk coast’. It’s a nice juxtaposition, in Britten’s centenary year, therefore to contrast his experimentation with medieval mystery plays in the Church with the secret atomic experiments taking place just a short distance (and ferry ride) away. A case of littoral drift meets literary drift? (If you catch my drift.)