Afterword

Abstract

Researching this book, I was struck by how frequently the landscape of Purbeck fractured apart into a series of complex, contested versions of itself. Whether in the intertwined histories of leisure, war and aesthetics which mark the small section of Studland beach painted by Bell, the contrast between the radically different ideas about the “authentic” inhabitants of Purbeck put forward by Butts and Benfield, or the derailment of George Burt’s architectural vision by Nash’s surrealist sensibility, this is a fundamentally divergent landscape. Each one of these narratives links this territory to the wider world, making it impossible to think of Purbeck as isolated or static: Butts’s fictional landscape of ancient completion, unfolding in a timeless manner, is just one of many topographic fantasies produced out of the dynamic forces of modernity itself.