'Grass, Grass, Grass': Fox-hunting and the Creation of the Modern Landscape

Abstract

Modern fox-hunting developed at a time when the rural landscape was being transformed by Parliamentary Enclosure, and as such it provides an alternative narrative on that process. Hunting also provided an opportunity for the social relationships created by the enclosure movement to be articulated and displayed in a very public manner across the re-planned landscape. The article also uses fox-hunting as an example of how the cultural and social aspects of the modern landscape have been neglected in historic landscape studies, which is still focused on identifying and 'reading' features in the landscape. Hunting did not create monumental landscape features comparable with medieval deer-parks, yet it was a national obsession that was intimately connected to landscape change and management. Hunting, therefore, provides a fascinating example of how these processes were linked to cultural practices, which need to be understood together in order to understand how the modern landscape was created and inhabited.