The Natural Landscape

When beginning the study of any area, one should always try to discover what the landscape was like before men appeared and began to alter it. Nowadays we can largely ignore geology, relief, drainage, vegetation, and climate : bedrock and topsoil are well concealed beneath concrete and tarmac, hills are no obstacle to motor vehicles, streams are dry or diverted or bridged, natural cover has long since disap-peared, and the weather is a minor nuisance at worst. Yet the unimportance of those factors is very recent, for though we are insulated by technological advance from natural conditions, our predecessors were closely bound to and affected by their environment from earliest times almost to the present.

When William Hutton, Birmingham's first historian, wrote in 1780 that 'this happy spot enjoys four of the greatest benefits that can attend human existence, water, the air, sun, and a situation free from damp' he was showing that preoccupation with physical conditions which nearly all our forefathers have known.

Everything about human settlement : its date (early or late in national terms), its form, its size, its livelihood, its development : all have been determined by the nature of the top-soil and subsoil, the relief and vegetation cover, the provenance or lack of water, the regional or national location, and even by the weather.

What the land provides in natural resources is no longer of paramount importance, but it was always so un-til the advent of modern industry and communications, and of food imports from other regions and countries. True, history does not invariably happen for good geographical reasons only, but when we have these and no others to explain otherwise puzzling features of topography or development, it is reasonable to advance them.