Finding Lost Fruit: The Cider Poetic, Orchard Conservation, and Craft Cider Making in Britai

The conservation of orchards and the revival of craft cider making have created opportunities to maintain rural identity in a period of great economic change in the British countryside. Since the 1990s, a shift towards environmental conservation in agricultural policy has highlighted the importance of maintaining traditional agricultural landscapes for ecological benefit. The intersection of agricultural heritage and environmental conservation in Britain is a key site to investigate how people manage the relationship between the human and natural worlds. This dissertation focuses on the case of orchard conservation and craft cider making, to discover how the maintenance of a traditional landscape and the revival of a traditional agricultural practice have become popular and successful modes of adapting rural identity in a changing social world. This dissertation explores the poetic components contributing to an imagined geography of the British countryside and examines their particular expression through cider as a symbol of rural heritage. Through an intertextual and ethnographic study of the texts and performances of cider making and orchard conservation, I illustrate the discourses of conservation and heritage that shape orchard conservation and craft cider making as material realities of rural identity, and examine how they are put into practice by individual farmers and cider makers. This dissertation finds that the management of economic and environmental change in the countryside occurs not only through official policy, but through the evolution of traditional poetics and practices where people craft their understanding of rural identity today.