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The New Reading the Landscape: Fieldwork in Landscape History

"This completely rewritten version of Muir’s earlier book about the interpretation of landscape, originally published 20 years ago, is exciting and compulsive reading. It covers a range of aspects of landscape history (or historical geography, depending on how you look at it) in an eclectic and passionate way, combining analysis and aesthetics in a brilliantly fluid narrative . . . The book will be an ideal companion for teachers who themselves are keen on fieldwork and who want to know more about the heritage and the underlying sub-text of the landscape in which they and their classes go out to study and learn."
Times Educational Supplement, 23 June 2000

2Overall, the title of Muir’s The New Reading the Landscape: Fieldwork in Landscape History describes exactly what this book is: a guide to how we can use evidence contained within the fabric of today’s countryside to understand its history. It is extremely well illustrated, very reasonably priced, and will form a valuable guide for anyone who is curious about the history of our landscape.2
Devon Archaeology Society Newsletter (May 2000)

In this essential handbook for all those researching landscape history, Richard Muir explains how to recognize and interpret the complex evidence for historical change in England's countryside. Drawing on the wealth of research carried out since Reading the Landscape was originally published in 1981, Muir provides a masterly synthesis of current thinking about the history of the key elements in England's rural landscape. As well as covering familiar topics such as villages, woodlands and roads, he explores how landscape features are human ideas made manifest-boundary walls and hedges reflect territoriality, churches and henges reflect belief and castles and hillforts reflect status and the need for defence. Throughout, he explains how the researcher can link the evidence of field archaeology, ecology and documentary research to develop as complete a picture as possible.

An entirely rewritten successor to the original Reading the Landscape, with full referencing
Illustrated with 60 original maps guiding the reader through the interpretation of specific sites, and 40 high quality landscape photographs
Includes 29 tables explaining key landscape features, and how to diagnose them in the field

Market: All those carrying out research in landscape history: extra-mural students; students taking landscape-related courses in archaeology, history and geography; professional archaeologists, historians and ecologists. Amateur enthusiasts of landscape and local history.

Author: Richard Muir is Senior Lecturer in Geography in the University College of Ripon and York St John. He is one of Britain's most widely published and respected landscape historians. Two of his bestselling books on British landscape have won the Yorkshire Arts Literary Prize.

CONTENTS
Introduction

1. Woodlands, Forests and Parks
2. Landscapes of Colonisation
3. Lines in the Landscape
4. Routeways
5. Status, Authority and the Landscape
6. Landscapes of Belief
7. Villages, Hamlets and Farmsteads
8. Reading the Fieldscape
9. Defence in the Landscape

The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape 1700–1870

‘Tom Williamson’s scholarly, yet eminently readable, account . . . The Transformation of Rural England is a book which raises many questions and answers them in a highly satisfying way crossing the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines . . . Williamson stimulates our interest and challenges our preconceptions. The book makes first-class reading for anyone interested in the changing rural economy and landscape of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’
Parson Woodforde Society Quarterly Journal, Vol. XXXV No.3 Autumn 2002

This is the first book to study in detail the making of the rural English landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For decades historians have debated the nature, timing and even the existence of the ‘agricultural revolution’. This book approaches the debate from a new direction: that of landscape archaeology.

It argues that there was not one ‘agricultural revolution’ but many. The enclosure of open fields and the reclamation of heath and downland—spearheaded by aristocratic improvers and large capitalist farmers—mesmerised contemporaries. But most enclosures had little to do with the improvement of arable farming, large landowners played a minor role and the really revolutionary changes took place elsewhere, in parts of England which were not characterised by large estates, and were the work of tenant farmers rather than landowners.

Essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in landscape history and the rural environment
First book to study in detail the making of the rural English landscape in the 18th and 19th centuries
First book to use landscape archaeology to examine the nature of the 18th century 'agriculture revolution'

Market: Landscape historians and archaeologists. Students of landscape history, landscape archaeology and economic history. Economic historians. The general reader with an interest in the landscape, the rural environment and agricultural history.

Author: Tom Williamson is lecturer in landscape history at the University of East Anglia and has written widely on agricultural history, landscape archaeology and the history of garden design.

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