A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself. It is not a background, nor is it a stage. It is a history made manifest and, because this is so, the study of landscape resolves many of the old difficulties of method. There it is, the past in the present, constantly changing and renewing itself as the present rewrites its past and makes it new on behalf of the future. We read upon the face of the landscape the pasts which it has borne in order to create our present.
Fred Inglis, “Nation and community: a landscape and its morality,” The Sociological Review 25 (1977): pg. 489.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2011/03/03/185/