LANDSCAPE PARKS 313 



as a reason for its doing so. Especially in a park, where short-cutting 

 is so destructive of landscape beauty, a path should go towards its goal 

 by the easiest way, or if it does not actually do so, sufficient reasonable 

 obstructions should be introduced to give it this appearance. 



Beauty of curve of path, although it is decorative and seductive 

 upon the landscape plan, is a beauty to be sought only rarely in a land- 

 scape park. Like the flowing curve of the road, it emphasizes the 

 unity of a man-made thing and is therefore by so much incongruous 

 with naturalistic landscape character. Moreover in a wooded park 

 the sequential relation of comparatively distant parts of the same curve 

 which makes their beauty on plan often cannot be perceived in reality. 

 (See Plate 34.) Again, in an irregular topography decorative flow of 

 curve of path can seldom be obtained without some further sacrifice 

 of the closeness of the fitting of the path to the topography. If beauty 

 of curve can be produced without this sacrifice the only argument against 

 it is the greater conspicuousness it gives the path, and an argument in 

 its favor would be the apparently somewhat greater consistency of 

 direction of traffic over it, although this last efl^ect would probably 

 be sufficiently produced by a smooth curve even if it were not neces- 

 sarily a decorative curve on plan. In a level park, largely open and 

 intensively used, where the materials of the design are roads, paths, 

 trees, shrubs, and turf, and where perhaps the paths cannot escape far 

 from the influence of the roads, — or in other words where no better 

 beauty may be obtained, — this beauty of sequential path curvature 

 may be legitimately sought. (See Plate 31.) 



Roads, bridle paths, and footpaths in a park* may be run parallel Interrelation of 

 to each other, for instance where they pass through a narrow screen of p^'^f^ ""'^ 

 woods between one open unit and another, or where they must all pass 

 through a narrow valley, but since the bridle path can go where the 

 road cannot, and the footpath can go where the bridle path cannot, 

 much parallelism of these different ways is a waste of opportunity. 

 Where they do run parallel it is still possible to separate them by trees 

 and shrubs so that the noise and possible dust of the roads are made as 

 little annoying as may be to those using the footpaths. Running a 

 footpath alongside a road as a sidewalk is almost never advisable in 

 * For materials for roads and paths see Chapter X, p. 227. 



