Changing Approaches to Local History. Warwickshire history and its historians (The Boydell Press, 2022)

Abstract

Chapter 12, John Martin, Joane Serrano, Jaqueline Nowakowski and Dominica Williamson reflect on sustainable development goals, and the experience of traversing two heritage areas, Ifugao Rice Terrace landscape in the Philippines (a World Heritage Site) and Carwynnen Quoit in Cornwall, UK (adjacent to a World Heritage site). They suggest that walking trails is a way of connecting with the heritage of the landscape and participants own sense of place. In Chapter 13, Daniele Valisena writes a ‘walking ethnography of place’ on terrils (coal slag heaps, now home to a wide variety of plants and animals). The terrils are inherently unstable elements in the landscape, from the lives of miners who worked them, to the slag heaps themselves which are stabilised by planted woodland, and the surrounding area which experiences frequent mine shaft collapse and a local microclimate. Valisena explores how moving through the landscape is part of thinking about it in a less anthropocentric way. In Chapter 14, Maria Piekarska explores Jewish-Israeli relationships with hiking through the Martyr’s Trail through a forest planted symbolically in 1951, and the role of storytelling, memorialisation and the relatively modern nature of the landscape, notwithstanding traces of pre-1948 Palestinian villages. In Chapter 15, Faidon Moudopoulos Athanasiou and Ionas Sklavounos write about participatory project working in the landscape reconstructing kalderimia (cobbled pathways) with the help of a diverse group of craftspeople, academics, students and local people in Zagori, north-west Greece. They and their participants were embedded in the landscape in a practical way, encountering past through objects and bringing new interpretations to the past through their findings and conversations. In Chapter 16 Benjamin Richards discusses movement heritage as including the more-than-human, based on his research in south-eastern Norway, in an area where post-industrial sites are being reintegrated into a landscape of trails and paths. Richards covers themes such as the value (current, future, past and perceived) of paths, the meanings of movement in the landscape and ideas such as desire and drift, as well as the status of paths, contrasting rights of way (e.g. England) with the right to roam (e.g. Norway) and the effect this has on paths and movement through landscape. The book as a whole constitutes an eye-opening exploration of the different meanings of pathways. It is an ambitious book, which covers a wide range of topics, and will be of interest to many landscape historians, at least in part. In addition to being available as a paperback, it is also available open-access online through JSTOR, which is ideal for reading individual chapters or sections.