Welsh Journals

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES: IN THE STEPS OF E.G. BOWEN. COLIN THOMAS Thomas, Colin. 1985: Landscape with Figures: in the steps of E. G. Bowen. Cambria Vol. 12(1), pp. 15 to pp. 31. Part I in: Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. E. G. Bowen was one of the most famous historical and cultural geographers of his generation in Britain. This exploration of the sources of Bowen's ideas in geography also pays special attention to his contemporaries and explains how cultural themes such as origins, transmission, regions and continuity illuminated his academic work particularly his pioneering studies of Wales. Colin Thomas, Dept. of Environmental Studies, University of Ulster, Coleraine, N. Ireland, U.K. BT5 21SA. This essay was written as a response to an invitation to preface the conference in honour of the memory of E. G. Bowen, rather than as a wider evaluation or assessment of his career and work which can be found elsewhere (Thomas 1986). In such a memorial conference it seemed appropriate to explore the sources of Bowen's ideas on geography, particularly his special field of historical geography, and education generally, to pick up the threads and follow them back wherever they lead. In the context of his own life and research, four topics or strands would seem to be worth consideration as a broad framework cultural origins, culture transmission, culture regions and cultural continuity. While those themes will not be taken as a explicit formal structure they will be seen to be implicit in everything described in the pages that follow. In late January 1834 a son was bom into a prosperous landed family in the village of Lewtrenchard to the northwest of Dartmoor in Devon. He was Sabine Baring-Gould (D.N.B. 1922-1930). Having been educated privately abroad because of illhealth (he lived to be almost 90 and had no fewer than 5 sons and 9 daughters!), Baring-Gould took a degree at Cambridge in 1856, taught for several years in Sussex and was a clergyman in Yorkshire and Essex before inheriting his father's 3000-acre estate and succeeding his uncle at the village rectory in Devon. Over a period of more than 60 years he published over 150 books and pamphlets on theology and sermons, myths and legends, fairy tales and folk songs, novels and travel, including 2 volumes on Wales that appeared in 1903-05.