Communities still think of themselves in Arcadian terms.

Above: one of the interests I have is in the conceptual idea of "arcadia" and whether it can still be found in the county. Arcadia is typically represented as a "lost" golden age of pastoral simplicity, where shepherd communities live untrammeled (one could almost say uncontaminated) by the modern world. This is a winter view of "arcady" - the light was fading so the sheep are slightly indistinct.

Bare trees, cold wind, hewn logs ready to go onto the farmhouse fire.



Above: Springtime arcady. The rolling green hills, the May blossom on the trees, the young lambs. We are only a few weeks from seeing the county transform itself into a passable representation of an earthly paradise.



Above: arcady in Summer. The aromatic nettles edge the fields, the birds sing, the sheep safely graze. This photograph does not do justice to the view, which was a hundred times more beautiful than this image indicates.

Arcadia in music - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYjqnlc7MRw



Above: although arcadia may physically exist in the county, did the local folk recognise it as such? There is evidence that they did. In one village I looked at last year a Victorian patriarch and his wife still watched over the family pew in the parish church.



Above: on an adjoining wall was this picture of three rams, pride of their flock and winners at the Royal Show. The livestock were given equal iconic status with the ancestral portraits. Does this indicate a conception of Heaven in which sheep accompany their arcadian masters?



Above: a humbler montage of photographs at a village hall, demonstrating a nostalgic view of "how things used to be" (encompassing the unspoken subtext: "and how things ought to be now"). At the centre is the flat-capped figure of the arcadian grandfather and shepherd. Although technology may have changed modern farming, the communities still think of themselves in arcadian terms.