THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Baked-mud smells, river smells, a hot-blue sky, a warm, wind… Not to mince matters, and to offer you, in passing, an impromptu theory, sexuality perhaps reveals itself more readily in a flat land, in a land of watery prostration, than in, say, a mountainous or forested terrain, where nature’s own phallic thrustings inhibit man’s, or in towns and cities where a thousand artificial erections (a brewery chimney, a tower block) detract from our animal urges.

Swift/Waterland, 1983

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Nor trees nor bush about it grows
That from the hatchet can repose,
And the horizon stooping smiles
Oer treeless fens of many miles.
Spring comes and goes and comes again
And all is nakedness and fen.

John Clare, ‘The Fens’ (1824)