Minnie Darling wrote:Copehead wrote:I think the "set piece" landscapes in the US are undoubtedly without equal for drama, but the UK is generally pretty whereas the US is generally boring.
That is because one is ( just about ) a continent with remarkably invariant geology and the other is a country with the most variable geology on Earth for its size.
As Rayge says you can't travel much more than 20 miles in the UK without encountering dramatically different landscapes whereas you can travel for hours in the US and see no change at all
I would prefer to visit US landscapes as one offs but I would far rather live in the UK landscape, it is familiar for one thing, as a geologist I am familiar with most of it and its reasons for being as it is. But also, as Rayge also says , landscape in the UK is far more tied into history and myth and that makes it rather more interesting. Most of the US was only inhabited less than 200 years ago, what sort of relationship can people have with such a landscape?
For real mountain drama, as Deebank says, the Canadian Rockies are without equal, but I would love to visit the big desert parks of the SW US and Yosemite and Jellystone and the Grand Canyon, and the Hudson river valley etc etc etc
What difference does the length of time a country has been inhabited make to the relationship you have with the landscape?
Every difference!
It's about history, folklore, myth, legend, mystery and it's around every corner in the UK.
Read Alan Garner, or John Cowper-Powys.
If there's one thing modern archeology has demonstrated, it's that the earliest structures (up to 6,000 years old) still strewn around our countryside directly reference their surroundings and were perhaps raised in reverence to the very living landscape itself!!!
(apologies got a bit carried away there...)