Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. it is a place imagined by people and people do not live very long or look very hard. we are very bad at scale. the things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. we are bad at time, too. we cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead, we live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. we take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history

helen macdonald