Story and the outdoors, fiction or non-fiction?

The landscape is storied. The landscape is cloaked in multifarious stories. ‘Scape’ is a suffix derived from the French meaning to cloak, as in ‘to cloak in meaning or stories’. Some of these stories are from the past ‘written’ in the features and names in the landscape or the memories of people. They tell of ice ages, forests, long extinct animals, human settlements and lives, invasions, agriculture, industry and leisure. For example ‘Grizedale’, the name of several valleys in the English Lake District where I live, is constructed of old Norse words integrated into the local dialect from Viking settlers 1,200 years age (Rollinson, 1989). A ‘grize’ is a wild boar, extinct in Britain since the thirteenth century (though recently returning to the wild in the south of England). A ‘dale’ is a U shaped glaciated valley. Just one word holds so many interweaving stories. As in this case, some of these stories are natural histories and some are cultural histories.