Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 30

A thin tapering peninsula jutting out from the mainland of England, the Southwest’s defining feature, from both a geographical and a visitor’s point of view, is its coastline which stretches for more than 600 miles, encompassing everything from high, wave-battered cliffs to soft sandy beaches and grass-covered dunes. The region is underpinned by a variety of different rocks. To the west, in Cornwall and Devon, these are mainly hard, igneous rocks, such as granite, which give the moors their distinct tor-studded appearance. These represent the oldest sections of the landscape, the results of rumbling volcanic activity around 300 million years ago which created the bulging, undulating intrusions that have only slowly, reluctantly been eroded into today’s familiar hill-scattered landscape. To the east are softer sedimentary rock, such as sandstone, limestone, clay and chalk, all of which were laid down during later geological periods, and which give the countryside above them a gentler, more rolling aspect.

Industry, particularly tin and copper mining, once the dominating feature of the interior landscape, has faded into the background in recent decades, with much of the former infrastructure now either abandoned and being slowly reclaimed by nature or turned into wildlife reserves and tourist attractions – most notably in the form of the Eden Project in a former St Austell china-clay pit.

In the rural heartland, particularly on the lonely moors, the land can feel feral and untamed, although this is something of a bucolic illusion. Little of the land here is truly wild. Most has endured some reshaping by humans. Agriculture began here in prehistoric times, soon after the end of the last Ice Age, and over the millennia the needs of farming and industry have seen the region’s once-thick woodland cleared for timber and fuel and to provide land for grazing, the grasslands divided up by hedgerows and dry-stone walls into a merry patchwork of fields, seams of metal pulled out of the earth and entire hillsides obliterated to provide stone for housing, harbours and roads.

Despite the influence of humankind, pockets of wild flora and fauna can still be found, albeit not in the abundance and diversity of times past. Modern, intensive farming methods have seriously degraded many environments. But human influence hasn’t been entirely hostile. Recent decades have seen the local population waking up to the wonders on its doorstop – and the dangers facing them – leading to the creation of the protected areas and national parks that are now the region’s main havens for wildlife.