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Sense of Place
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thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat
6219 posts

Re: Sense of Place
May 06, 2012, 14:50
That's all very true. I think we all do it ourselves when visiting a site, you mentally filter it in much the same way that a paiter, writer or photographer chooses what to leave out as much as what to put in.

When you walk down a busy city street, you filter out a lot of the noise, conversations, machinery, etc because otherwise you'd go mad. Similarly, when you're at a site, I think you (subconciously) filter out what you see. At Tinkinswood, the pylons appear at first to be hugely intrusive and unavoidable, but if you stay a while they fade out and become largely forgotten. The "better" the site, because of its physical integrity, or because of a beautiful setting, the better the filter works, I think. If you find a poorly preserved site, a ploughed down mound, whatever, you start to notice the other "negative" aspects, the litter, the rusting farm machinery, the barbed wire fences, etc, more than you do at a more impressive site.

I also reckon your own mood will have an inevitable effect on the sense you get of a place. TE's beautiful quotes come from someone on the eve of going to war, feelings coloured by knowing he may never return. In my own experience, my sense of a site can be coloured by past associations (especially where my dad is concerned), or by the feeling that you may never come somewhere again.

Slightly changing point, I think Stan Beckenstall makes a brilliant point about "sense of place" in "Prehistoric Rock Art in Britain":

Stan Beckensall wrote:
Did people [visiting rock art sites in prehistoric times] make a wish, did they bring to the spirit of the place a problem, a thank-you?Were they like people who visit churches on rare occasions and light a candle for a similar reason, without necessarily believing in all that the church stands for? Even without the decoration, rocks can be pleasant to sit by, especially when the views from them are stunning. There can be solitude there, detachment from the world, a different perspective on life. Oh yes, places can indeed have power. We might even feel that when we experience them we have recovered something that we thought we might have irrevocably lost - a link with a world of nature that elsewhere is concreted over and swamped with adverts and other lies and cajoleries. We are not like prehistoric people: no way, for we have too much built-in change, but we are not totally separate. We can share up to a point the places that they may have visited, and perhaps even share some feelings with them, but it is a mistake to think that we can tune in fully to their minds. That i
am so reluctant to theorise about what I cannot know, yet I can appreciate in basic ways the places where they left their presence and their marks. I can hear someone asking them the question: "Why do you do this?" Their answer might be, "Because we've always done it this way".

.....

With rock-art, the enjoyment of places and designs is what matters most to me. I am not worried about what I don't know, because perhaps I never will.[/quote]
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