Abstract
AbstractMuch of the eastern seaboard of England lying between East Yorkshire and the Pevensey Levels in Kent constitutes an English Lowlands, a distinctive region characterized by large areas of ma...
Highlights
Picture a Dutch scene and the chances are that it will depict a flat landscape in which both a canal and a windmill figure
Much of the eastern seaboard lying between East Yorkshire and the Pevensey Levels in Kent constituted an English Lowlands, a distinctive region characterized by large areas of marsh and fen, and a sub-culture borne out of the vicissitudes and travails of living with the constant r
As Sir William McArthur noted, “Today a footnote would be necessary to explain its significance to the ordinary English reader.”[14]. Malaria characterized the English Lowlands as much as did its topography, and its people had to adapt to this disease as much as to the environment, learning how to “live with uncertainty”
Summary
Picture a Dutch scene and the chances are that it will depict a flat landscape in which both a canal and a windmill figure. Its landscape was singled out in the national consciousness by the great quantity of land reclaimed from the sea, crisscrossed by drains and dykes, and interspersed with windmills, and by its people with their pallid complexions, strange laws and customs, and a distinctive architecture of houses built on stilts. This was a landscape where danger lurked in the unstable, frequently waterlogged ground, where bog and quicksand might make short shrift of the unwary, and in its airs vi where the miasmas given off by rank vegetation were considered to lay low even the locals with the ague or marsh fever that had popularly begun to be called after the Italian “bad air”. Lowlands as a distinctive region began to fade from the national and historical consciousness
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