"In a country every way by nature favourable to health": Landscape and Public Health in Victorian Rural Wales.

Rather than seeing landscape as an invisible backdrop to sanitary reform, this article offers another context through which to consider the problems facing local authorities and sanitary officials in identifying and tackling sanitary problems. Using Wales as a case study, this article first addresses how rural landscapes were imagined and second how as "environments" and "territories" they influenced patterns of sanitary reform. If underlying ideological meanings were attached to the landscape, as this article suggests, the rural landscape was a plural one in that it also acted as a barrier to sanitary reform.