Tales as old as time

By appointing writers-in-residence to landscape locations, the National Trust is hoping to spark in us a new engagement with our ancient surroundings, finds Richard Smyth

- Richard Smyth

WRITERS and landscapes can produce magic together. Think of Emily Brontë and the Pennine moors or Thomas Hardy and Dorsetshire heath-some writers and some landscapes simply seem made for one another.

At Brimham Rocks in Nidderdale, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, the National Trust is hoping that a young writer can strike up a new kind of relationship with the site's heathland, birch woodland and ancient gritstone formations. Huddersfield-born Natalie Anastasia Davies is the site's first writer-in-residence.

'I believe that connection with the natural world is integral to our sense of meaning and wellbeing,' the writer said on her appointment earlier this year. 'It is a rare thing in our bustling lives to have time in Nature, to be, realise and create.' She feels privileged, she added, to be the first person to take up the post.