TOWARDS THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, in his Third Letter on a Regicide Peace (1797), Edmund Burke feared that ‘All the little quiet rivulets, that watered a humble, a contracted but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and boundless barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France’. Even a decidedly non-agricultural thinker like Burke used landscape metaphors, and in similar terms to those commonly employed both by the aesthetes and agricultural improvers of the time. The first part of this statement – that ‘contracted’, ‘not unfruitful’ field – can be seen to describe the enclosed landscape – small, probably hedged and, by implication, improved, productive, even pretty.

The image of this snug, small-scale, ‘enclosed’ landscape is then set against the ‘waste’ and (once again) ‘barren’ expanse of a presumably unenclosed French (and therefore alien and dangerous) landscape. In his introduction to a 1990 edition of Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Adam Philips noted that Burke's ideas, whether on the Sublime, Nature or the politics of the time, were always conditioned by a ‘paradoxical search for confining formulations’ (my italics) where he ‘senses the infinite possibilities of human subjects and a complimentary terror of endless confusion and uncertainty’. In response to this, Burke established ‘a set of deeply resilient terms for British conservatism, which rested on … an unreflexive dedication to tradition’.