Glossary of British landscape created

Dominick Tyler is spending a year documenting the British landscape and collating its vocabulary to create a new kind of glossary.

Tyler hopes his Landreader Project will remind us of a time when our ancestors read the lines on the land as fluently as text.

“Our increasingly urbanized lives and the resulting loss of countryside knowledge means that a large part of this communication has become vestigial and many of the words I’ve collected have fallen into obscurity”, he said.

“The outside, the countryside has become the unfamiliar “other”, a threat to be overcome and dominated, not understood and enjoyed. Might this partly be because we feel uncomfortable with things for which we have no name? Perhaps we have chosen to render the landscape in such broad, bland terms in order to insulate ourselves from the loss of it?”

The glossary is available online on www.thelandreader.com/glossary. Tyler is encouraging people to submit words for inclusion, which you can do on his website.