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'The working drawing for Northamptonshire ... has the key to his compositional process scribbled in the margins. The proposed content is divided into the industrial side and the traditional side. The industrial side is away to the distant left – "Corby with its sulphurous smoke and giant bunsen burner; overhead bucket cables converging on Corby; open-cast iron ore quarrying: special iron ore tip lorries; corn crops growing to the edge of quarries". Over to the right is the traditional side - Queen Eleanor's Cross; the spire of a typical church, and Middleton Cheney. Between them are "fine stonework and carving on church towers, great country houses. and beautiful thatch and stone-roofed stone houses with careless patches of red brick and slate horrors." The foreground shows ancient and modern boots, a Roman stone coffin, Roman castor ware and Northamptonshire's favourite sons, George Washington and John Dryden. The powerful mass of Henry Moore's "Mother and Child" statue in St Matthew's Church, Northampton, is in the centre, but before the final illustration was completed the claims of Yorkshire took Henry Moore and his Madonna on a free transfer to the county guide of his birthplace.'
(Chris Beetles, S R Badmin and the English Landscape, London: Collins, 1985, pages 34-35)
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