I went to see God’s Own Country last weekend, and found it
a rare treat. It wasn’t just the same-sex
love story at the film’s heart – though god knows it’s a relief to see a film
where gay characters get to do more than nobly triumph over homophobia – but also
the bleak but ultimately uplifting portrayal of family and subsistence farming
in the hills of West Yorkshire.
Alongside the slow-burn relationship between taciturn farmer
Johnny and Romanian hired hand Gheorghe, the film charts the physical decline
of Johnny’s father’s, debilitated by two strokes, and shows the unsentimental
despatching of sick animals. But the stolid landscape of mud, rock and
moorland, the backdrop to these scenes of decay and death, endures in the
watery spring daylight. It’s beautiful,
Georghe says to Johnny as they tackle the sisyphean task of repairing a dry
stone wall, but lonely too.
A few years ago, recovering from illness but still fearful,
I went walking in the Chilterns, the hills of my childhood. Up above Princes Risborough, I felt a curious elation. These hills, these chalk markings, these beech trees that
were here when I visited as a child, they would still be here after my
death. They were completely indifferent
to my existence. But their indifference was not daunting, like the vastness of
the universe, but comforting, of human scale, an assurance of a future beyond
my life.
I felt something like that watching the film. The West
Yorkshire hills would still be there when all the characters had gone, as would
the dry stone walls and farm buildings. The landscape is indifferent, but not
unaffected; the human touch is everywhere – either visibly in built structures or
implicitly in patterns of cultivation. And perhaps it is in these landscapes,
in the dry stone walls and the cairns assembled by walkers on hill paths, that
we non-architects gain some measure of longevity, of immortality even, some
sense of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph ‘si monumentum requiris, circumpsice’ –
if you are seeking a memorial, look around you.
