This article discusses how educated Scots evaluated landscapes between about 1400 and 1700. In more recent times, people have tended to distinguish between farmland or working landscapes, seen as unattractive, and wild or ‘natural’ landscapes, seen as attractive. But before 1700, people primarily admired productive landscapes. Throughout three centuries, the discourse remained remarkably stable: productive landscapes were pleasant, and pleasing landscapes were productive. The article pursues this argument across a series of specific landscape categories: orchards, arable fields, pasture and meadows, woodland, mountains and inland waters. A section on ‘fruitfulness in the future’ discusses the beginnings of a newer view of seeing landscape as fruitful only once it has been, or will be, further developed. Overall, though, across the three centuries covered by this article, Scots typically liked ‘fruitful country’.
Rhodes et al. (Fri,) studied this question.