The village where I live “is an old, old, place…” (Aurthur Mee, 1936, In A Guide to St Marys Church and the History of Litton, by Christopher Booker 2019). Centred on the 14th century church, itself replacing one far older, bounded by ancient Oak, Ash and Yew, encircled by the Mendip hills and the river; the Domesday Book records three watermills powered by the fast flowing Chew, Litton being Anglo Saxon for ‘a settlement by a torrent’. Traces of medieval ridge and furrow fields to the east; holloways tracing ancient routes, hewn deep into the ground. It is a landscape which gives tangible expression to Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’ whereby “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of and testimony to- the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left something of themselves” (Ingold the temporality of landscape prologue)
