Harry Andrews Y4
The Park Ascending Over the course of the twentieth century, despite restrictions of access to rural areas experienced by the majority of people in Britain, attempts were made to reinvent the countryside. A moment of social democracy was the passage of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, which helped transform some of Britain's most celebrated landscapes into widely promoted sites of leisure, their success seemingly posing a threat to their purpose. When contemplating these landscapes our emotional response is often one that cannot be defined merely as nostalgia or patriotism. It is instead the realisation that something out of our consciousness remains undiscovered beneath the soil. The Park Ascending aims to restore an emotional connection with the landscape, revealing the networks yet to be discovered from lost methods of navigation within our National Parks. In turn, the scheme provides protective measures against the physical pressures and impacts of tourists ‘loving our parks to death’, by amplifying the sense of a place.
