Local Distinctiveness

Losing Your Place : Detail

In Australia vast areas seem to us to look the same, but the seasoned eye and the cultured brain sees and describes minute detail, water can be found from the smallest /subtlest constellation of clues, stories cling to small marks on rocks and the slightest rise can be a landmark for miles.

We seem to have a much greater capacity to see than we have to describe. Hence people sense when something has gone from their local scene, but can't articulate it... it could be a change in paving stones or the loss of a tree, it could be changes in the air quality resulting in the loss of moss growth and irridescence at certain times of year, it could be the displacement of a family firm by a chain store in its universal livery. And we tend to see things altogether, the fruit salad seems less good if someone has picked out all the banana.

Detail is important in our lives. Whatever our work or pleasure, our attention and affections are held by small complications, intricacies and provocations. We thrive on gossip, TV soaps, brick not concrete, things which repeat with endless variations at different scales, we were influenced by fractals long before someone gave them a name.

Just as Thomas Hardy talks of divining a mountain in the dark by the absence of stars, we recognize where we are through many different kinds of 'cues', and often we sense what is there through something else.

Ecologists use the term indicator species. Dog's Mercury suggests there was ancient woodland here. Geologists (following aboriginal practice) recognize the presence of certain minerals by the plants growing in those parts, sand wort is known as leadwort in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. Pollution and lichen experts read the presence of sulphur dioxide in the absence of Lobaria pulmonaria We can 'see' the salt line along roadsides in the centre of England by the presence of coastal plants such as sea spurrey. A Warwickshire gate lets us know subliminally we are in that county not in Gloucestershire.

Original attempts to map climate had to rely upon patterns read from vegetation, forests and deserts echoing particular limiting factors. Only when wind and temperature could' be monitored by scattered weather stations and at altitude did scientists find affirming evidence of coincidence through direct information. The invisible had been understood through the visible. The effects of Chernobyl's deathly clouds can still be traced on Cumbrian hills through sheep with blue marks.

History is often pieced together by detective work from traces and footprints. The interesting distribution of the Mazzard cherries along the Tamar valley and in one or two places in North Devon has lead people to speculate that they were brought in by the Huguenots, they add particularity and harbour secrets.

There are many latent languages which we decipher without realizing what richness we perceive. There is much non verbal communication between us and a place we know well. As well as responding to the obvious, we identify signs, hints, clues, traces, suggestions, gestures, intimations, and they gather further richness through juxtaposition. We respond to mosaic. We need the nourishment of detail, in things as ordinary as rumples in a field, detail in doors and windows, dialect, local festival days, seasonal variation in the goods on sale in the market, to subtly stimulate our senses and sensibilities.

Losing Your Place
Local
Distinctiveness
Authenticity
Particularity
Patina
References

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