Britain is a good place for earth works. The climate, the soils and the topography encourage people to go out and build turf-castles. From the pre-historic Avebury Ring in Wiltshire to Charles Jencks' and Maggie Keswick's 1990s garden in the Borders, there has been a tradition in the British Isles of sculpting the earth into sensuous forms, held firm by close-cropped turf. Rain helps to grow abundant grass. Sheep and rabbits help to keep the surface short and smooth. And the low northern light shows off the subtle forms to perfection - particularly with the accent of ground frost.

The magical forms of tumuli rising through autumn mist have stirred imaginations from Spenser to Hardy. Viking barrows, sacred circles and earth mazes form a deep sediment of landscape memory in the national mind. Pre-historic burial mounds, such as the one in Richmond Park, have been re-used for hunting high-points and communication look-outs. The Richmond Park mound aligns with St Paul's cathedral and is now named King Henry VIII's mount. Henry supposedly waited there for the signal from the Tower that Anne Boleyn had been beheaded and he could ride off to marry number three. The Thames landscape was dotted with similar viewing mounds. Francis Bacon created mounds at Twickenham Park (as well as Gray's Inn) in the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century, a whole series of mounds were raised along the river, notably for Princess Caroline at Richmond Lodge and Alexander Pope in Twickenham.

Mounds and earthworks had sound military credentials as well. Maiden Castle, Silbury Hill, Old Sarum, Offa's Dyke and even Palmerston's anti-Napoleonic redoubts have left an inheritance of sublime earth sculptures generated by defence. Some military earth works, such as Downton Moot, were appropriated as garden features during the eighteenth century at a time when English self-confidence allowed defensive structures to become scenes for parties and garden theatre.

Charles Bridgeman was a particular genius with geometric earth sculpting. While breaking away from the surface intricacy of French and Dutch parterre design at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bridgeman worked a more subtle formality on a massive scale using the grass-clad shape of the land itself. Changing light and shade revealed the planes of his designs, while a looser frame of woodland trees directed views out into productive agricultural land beyond. Many of Bridgeman's crisp, turf forms were later smoothed away by Lancelot Brown, but where his work survives at Stowe, Rousham and Kensington Gardens, for example, it shows a dramatic artistry which rivals contemporary designs. The grass amphitheatre at Claremont, restored by the National Trust in the 1970s, is perhaps the most astonishing of all Bridgeman's projects. It is hard to believe the perspective in drawings of the amphitheatre until one actually sees the sharp slopes carved out of the hillside. Bridgeman's earthforms at Claremont, set beside Aislabie's moon ponds at Studley Royal, reveal a tradition which has reemerged in contemporary landscape design in the Borders and is now inspiring mounds and earthworks throughout Europe.

For much of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more informal and naturalistic earth shaping became fashionable. The dramatic forms of the earth works in the walled garden at Alnwick Castle (1840s) were an impressive exception. Geometric turf sculpting was revived with art deco in the 1930s. Fine grass terraces were created at Woodfalls in Melchett Court, Parnham and Dartington Hall, for example. Earth works are now identified as an independent art. Some of the most imaginative new directions have been led by environmental artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. Andy Goldsworthy's kilometre-long slag heap snake between two railway lines manages to touch humour and environmental responsibility as well as beauty.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, earth works have also drawn on a separate tradition of native American design. The materials, scale and light are often different, tending to work with massive rock projects in desert areas. James Turrell's plans for the Roden Crater near Flagstaff is an example. Turrell will create seven spaces to experience the changing qualities of sun and moonlight around an extinct volcano cone in the Arizona desert. Beverley Pepper is an American sculptress who has worked on a smaller scale, creating a powerful, sunken 'amphisculpture' of stone and grass for AT&T at Bedminster, New Jersey in 1977 and more recently the Parc del Estacio del Nord in Barcelona. In the Barcelona project, Pepper again worked with a sunken amphitheatre-like space, but juxtaposed it with a ceramic mound, reminiscent of the tradition of the city's most celebrated architect, Gaudi. The new public park is immensely popular with the local community and well-used by all age groups.

Some earthworks in the United States are also clothed with grass, very much in the English tradition. At his farm in Maine, James Pierce has consciously drawn on burial mounds, military redoubts and turf mazes to create a series of sculptural earthworks. Pierce's 'Earthwoman', is a particularly witty addition. A female form with fecund buttocks lies face down in the meadow, the long grass on its flanks rippling in the wind. One of the most sensuous new earthworks has been created by Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Lin has created a 'Wave Field' of rippling turf. The rhythmic abstraction of the form echoes agricultural furrows as well as the sea and fits elegantly with the commissioning Aerospace Engineering. Whether inspired by particle physics, chaos theory or druidic mounds, working the earth as land art is a tradition which continues to touch something deep within us.

Kim Wilkie viii.98

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