Creatures Enshrined: Wild Animals as Bearers of Heritage

Abstract

In 1976, Patrick Cormack published a book entitled Heritage in Danger. The Conservative MP, who founded the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group a few years later and chaired it for thirty years, included chapters on the country house, the village, the church, and the city. His first chapter, however, was devoted to what he characterized as ‘at once the most obvious and enjoyed and also the most neglected aspect of our heritage’: the countryside. In fact, Cormack greatly exaggerated the extent to which the rural landscape has been neglected within understandings of heritage and initiatives for historical preservation. Since the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe and North America, places primarily associated with nature have acquired value as ‘visible symbols of an invisible past’—whether in the guise of picturesque countryside, outstandingly beautiful scenery, or ‘pristine’ wilderness. The remit of the National Trust (1895) was to protect places of natural beauty in England and Wales as well as historic buildings: at a meeting to plan the new organization, founder Octavia Hill appealed to those ‘to whom historic memories loom large, who love the wild bird, butterfly, and plant, who realise the natural value of the hill slope lighted by sun or shadowed by cloud’. And by the early twentieth century, many preservationists considered the heritage value of exceptional places (the ‘natural beauties of rural districts’, to use Baldwin Brown’s phrase) equal to that of the most esteemed material products of human creation. As explained by Brown, a professor of fine arts, the fundamental basis for comparison was the similar ‘effect on the mind’: