Love Quote by Fay Godwin

There is a quiet defiance in Godwin’s phrasing: she doesn’t “visit” the landscape, she “works with” it. That preposition matters. It frames land not as scenery to be consumed but as a collaborator that pushes back - weather, light, access, time, politics. “Walking it” lands like a credo: the body is the first camera, the route a kind of argument. Before the shutter, there’s stamina, mud, trespass, and repetition. Her photographs weren’t souvenirs; they were reports from sustained contact.

The subtext is also a subtle correction to a romantic British tradition that treats countryside as timeless and benign. Godwin’s career moved through the late-20th-century churn of conservation debates, privatization pressures, and anxieties about who gets to claim “the countryside.” To say she’s been “working with the land” is to hint at labor and responsibility in a space often coded as leisure for some and exclusion for others. It aligns with her stark, unsentimental style: landscapes that are beautiful but never decorative, charged with human decisions even when people are absent.

“And I love it to bits” snaps the statement into something more intimate and unslick. It’s not lofty pastoral worship; it’s affection with grit under the nails. The line reads like a refusal to pretend that seriousness requires chill. Godwin gives you the whole circuit: long attention, hard miles, and a plainspoken love that doesn’t cancel critique - it sharpens it.