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Fairclough, G.J. and Wigley, A. 2006: Historic Landscape Characterisation: An English approach to landscape understanding and the management of change, in del Arbo, M-R & Orejas, A.(eds) 2005:Landscapes as Cultural Heritage in the European Research, Proceedings of COST A27 Workshop, Madrid 2004. 87-106

HISTORIC LANDSCAPE CHARACTERISATION: AN ENGLISH

APPROACH TO LANDSCAPE UNDERSTANDING AND THE

MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE.

Graham Fairclough and Andy Wigley

This paper describes the concept and process of Historic Landscape Characterisation

(HLC) that has been developed by English Heritage and its Local Government

partners as a tool for managing the historic environment in England. The

development of HLC is described in relation to the broader context of heritage

management in the UK and Europe, and the theory and practice behind HLC, and its

relationship to other disciplines and the principle of sustainability, is explained.

These points are illustrated through a case study, showing how HLC was applied by

Shropshire County Council and English Heritage in Shropshire, in the English West

Midlands. Finally, the paper outlines the various applications of HLC for heritage

management, spatial planning, community outreach and lifelong learning, its

relationships with other forms of landscape assessment and some of the new

directions in which it might lead heritage management.

1. The background to HLC

Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) is a relatively new method for applying

archaeological ideas and perspectives to the study and management of landscape. At

the same time it was also designed to introduce a particular type of landscape

perspective to the practice of archaeology. . Landscape archaeology itself is not new,

of course, but HLC is different. It differs in scale (being deliberately broad brush and

generalised), in its focus on the present day landscape; and it differs in its aims, which

are equally concerned with landscape management as with research.

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The tradition of protecting archaeological sites (‘ancient monuments’) which has been

established in the UK for over a century (together with its c50 years old extension to

buildings) is firmly rooted in a concern for fabric, qualitative selection and a relatively

narrow definition of the concept ‘site’. Archaeology, as a research discipline, has long

taken a wider, landscape-scale, view, for example in work from the early 20th century

of OGS Crawford and others. By 1990, however, practitioners of heritage

management (or ‘archaeological resource management’- ARM) still remained focused

mainly on sites and monuments. This was the name given, for example, to the

country’s archaeological databases held by county councils as the higher, sub-

regional, level of the UK’s municipalities. More significantly, the traditional approach

is founded on preservation systems that use legal controls imposed by designations

such as scheduling (or archaeological monuments) and listing of historic buildings.

During the mid 1980s, after the protection of the monuments themselves had been

put on a more secure footing by new legislation introduced in 1981, a wider view

could be more safely be taken and a stronger interest developed among archaeologists

and others for the setting of monuments and for their wider landscape context. In

1986, a register of important designed park and garden landscapes was established,

followed shortly afterwards by one for battlefield sites. These innovations also

encouraged heritage managers to consider the wider landscape. Similar extensions of

interest occurred in the field of nature conservation and landscape assessment

(‘countryside management’) as well. Nature conservationists began to recognize the

need for a landscape-scale context for preserving habitats and nature reserves (that is

for action beyond designations), whilst the practice of landscape assessment, after a

period of focusing on justifying the selection and definition of legally-designated

special protected areas such as National Parks, began to consider all areas of

landscape.

2. The rationale for HLC

A Government decision in 1991 to consider the desirability of establishing a register

of the most important historic landscapes was therefore timely. The suggestion,

however, was framed in the conventional way suitable for monuments and sites: it

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assumed that tried and tested methods for discrete sites (inventory, selection,

designation) would also work for the wider landscape. When asked to look into the

issue, therefore, English Heritage (the national agency responsible in England only for

the conservation and presentation of what was coming to be known as the historic

environment) concluded that a monument-based approach would be inadequate for

the wider landscape. Out of this grew the historic landscape characterisation approach

(Fairclough et al 1999). This approach rejected the idea of selecting special,

‘landscapes’ because one of landscape’s primary characteristics is seen to be its

ubiquity and its local distinctiveness; landscape is valuable precisely because it is a

genuinely common heritage, existing everywhere. Selecting a few special areas would

devalue the rest to a far greater extent than similar selections for, for instance,

buildings.

The new approach suggested by English Heritage also turned away from the idea of

protective controls for historic landscape. Specific components of landscape may

require protection by negative controls to prevent their destruction, but landscape in

its widest, perceptual and holistic sense is both too complex and too dynamic for

negative or passive modes of protection to be very useful. It contains more than just

archaeological values, and all its values need to be managed in an integrated fashion,

not piecemeal by different laws. Because much of the landscape is living and semi-

natural, its survival needs the continuation of historic processes which cannot be

enforced by designation and management. Parts of the landscape which are not

‘living’ in that sense (such as soils, hydrology, archaeological deposits, earthworks or

buildings) are themselves both the product of change and subject to further change.

Recognising change as inherently one of landscape’s characteristics, that makes it

what it is, indeed celebrating and valuing the visible effects of past change, should

discourage us from too strong an intervention against future change. Historic

Landscape Characterisation (and for that matter other types of historic

characterisation that have since been developed, for example urban characterisation)

is therefore a way of inventing new objectives and methods of heritage management

that are appropriate to landscape.

HLC thus had two main reasons for its development: a culmination of an expansion of

archaeology from site to area, and from monument to landscape, which included a

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desire to work in a more interdisciplinary fashion with landscape researchers from

other fields, and, second, a wish to explore newer approaches to conservation that is

connected to new ideas of sustainable development and integrated environmental

management. In both ways, the aim was to study the historic and archaeological

aspects of landscape so as to better understand it for the purpose of informed decision-

making in archaeological resource management, spatial planning and environmental

management. This paper is therefore about the heritage theory of managing change as

much as it is about landscape research.

More precisely, HLC seeks to broaden the horizons of both the archaeological

resource and the notion of ‘heritage’, both all too often seen as being a matter of

castles and churches, hillforts and burial mounds. The broadening included an

expansion from site-based work to the wider landscape, but also recognition of the

need to work in all periods simultaneously, rather than, for example, researching only

the Bronze Age landscape. It is also an expansion from conventional archaeological

sites and deposits (in general terms, things that can be excavated) to semi-natural, but

still historic and cultural, aspects of the landscapes such as trees and hedges. Finally,

it attempts to bring into the picture the locally-significant aspects of landscape, not

only those that register on a national scale.

HLC is also designed for closer integration than hitherto with other fields of

environmental management such as ecology or countryside management. In England,

landscape architects use a method called Landscape Character Assessment (LCA)

(Countryside Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage 2002). HLC was designed to be

compatible with LCA and its products, although at a more detailed ‘grain’ that reflects

the cultural rather than the topographic or natural grain of landscape. Many separate

disciplines can use landscape as a meeting place for debate and joint action in ways in

which they cannot use their own (normally site-specific) interests. In doing this, it is

necessary to adopt common methods and terminology, and HLC borrowed quite

heavily its early days from landscape assessment. More fundamentally, it is necessary

to adopt a common idea of landscape, and the concept which deals with landscape in

terms of character and perception is the most useful. This concept allows heritage

thinking to evolve from a sole concern with fabric to an interest in something more

intangible, which here is termed ‘character’. This in turn begins to change some of the

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assumptions about the goals of landscape management and preservation, which this

paper will also explore.

3. The broader context of HLC

At the same time as HLC was being developed, the Council of Europe (Council of

Europe 1995) and later its Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in Europe

were drawing up the European Landscape Convention. Published in Florence on the

20th October 2000, it was already in force on 1 March 2004 when it had been ratified

by 11 countries, and 15 countries have at May 2005 acceded to it, with a further 18

signatory countries working towards ratification (Council of Europe 2000).

The Convention is an instrument devoted exclusively to the protection, management

and planning of all landscapes in Europe, and to organising European co-operation on

landscape issues. Perhaps most importantly, it defines landscape simply but

comprehensively as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of

the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. It also specifies that

landscape exists everywhere, as common heritage and as a democratic resource and

asset. This resource occurs over the entire territory, in natural, rural, urban and peri-

urban areas, including land, inland water and marine areas and encompassing all areas

whether outstanding, everyday or degraded. The Convention proposes that managing

landscape requires multi-disciplinary work and characterisation-based approaches to

the whole landscape and its advice on this point and others is very close to the

philosophy of HLC.

An even broader framework for HLC is sustainability. When these ideas became

commonplace in the later 1980s, they were regarded as being concerned with global

environmental issues such as climate or air and water quality, and of little relevance to

the historic environment or archaeology. Exploration of the implications of

sustainable development for the archaeological heritage rapidly revealed many areas

of common interest, and began a process of reconsideration of the objectives and aims

of archaeological resource management that still continues. Central to these new ideas

is the notion of the past as part of the present, rather than as a subject of study in its

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own right. More influential was the view that people, and their perception, are as

important as the fabric of the archaeological resource: value and significance, as well

as being inherent (for example, in terms of evidence), are also invested in perception.

In all these ways, landscape is in fact the most effective vehicle for trying to come

closer to achieving sustainability.

A major advantage of landscape as a concept within which to present the

archaeological resource to a wider audience is that landscape is naturally more

accessible to more people than purely archaeological definitions of the environmental.

Being map-based helps in this, but so too does the ‘everywhere-ness’ of landscape: it

is accessible to any citizen because everyone has their own landscapes – their own

perceptions of the world in which they live and work. There were already moves

through the late 1980s and after (eg Berry and Brown 1995) to encourage the

integration of separate environmental conservation disciplines such as archaeology

and nature conservation. Landscape provides a better forum or meeting places for

various disciplines, not least because, as the Convention insists, it is intrinsically

interdisciplinary and belongs to no single discipline. .

HLC is only one type of characterisation, which is the process of using a strategic

interpretation of aspects of the historic environment to help inform and manage

change (English Heritage 2005). A definition commonly accepted in landscape

assessment is that Characterisation is the ‘describing, classifying and mapping of

landscape character, showing how one area is distinct from another”. It is concerned

with everywhere, ‘distinct from’ being a term that need not carry any suggestion of

being ‘better than’. It provides a bigger picture than is provided by conventional

monument-based work, bigger in both spatial and temporal terms, and in its

connections with other disciplines and its close relationship with perception and

intangibles. This bigger picture (which can also support more detailed or site-specific

work) obliges us to recognise that, if it is to conform to the concept of sustainability

outlined above, conservation is not just about site protection but about managing

change, and that this need not mean retaining everything but realigning our objectives

just as we expand our scope. It is a picture which encourages us to include and

embrace all parts of the landscape, whether most ancient or very recent.

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4. Historic Landscape Characterisation

HLC is part of a wider landscape study: it aims to provide an archaeologist’s

perspective which on its own is only part of landscape. Its results need to be

considered alongside those of professionals working in other disciplines (e.g.

landscape ecologists, geographers, landscape architects, historians or anthropologists),

as well as taking into account the non-expert perceptions that make landscape such a

powerful common heritage.

From an archaeological perspective, HLC treats landscape as material culture; as a

human artefact that contains within it rich resources of human history. Other

disciplines look at landscape in terms of the underlying natural fabric such as geology,

topography and landform; others again as extensive natural habitats, or as a part-

synonym for biodiversity. Some, such as landscape ecology, are concerned with

understanding the cultural management practices that create ecological systems. HLC

does not deny the importance of such aspects of landscape, but concentrates instead

on the human and cultural processes that, often very subtly, override or fight against

natural processes. As such, it assumes that the cultural overlay is more interesting and

complex than simplistic environmental determinism.

HLC also defines landscape as a perception rather than as an object. Thus landscape

should not be treated simply as a larger type of archaeological site: it is of a different

order: a way of seeing (and of being); I is not a physical thing in its own right.

Landscape is thus cultural twice over: it is a cultural construct of the present day that

takes its character primarily from a legacy of cultural and human activity in the past.

A consequence of this view is that landscape only exists in the present day as an issue

of perception. People in the past will have had their own mental landscapes and

attempting to rediscover these from the material remains (e.g. prehistoric

cosmography laid out in ritual monuments), should be an important branch of

landscape archaeology.

Landscape has many dimensions and attributes, such as topography, visual aesthetics

or habitat distribution. HLC takes as its particular area of study three aspects which

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are main-stream to archaeological research. Firstly, and self-evidently to

archaeologists, is the passage of time and its legacy - time depth, chronological

sequences, the superimposed layers of landscape, not all equally visible, that make up

landscape’s palimpsest. Second, it puts human agency to the fore-front, even if it

might have operated at some periods of the past in a narrow environmental frame.

This focus considers the historic processes that lie behind the fabric and morphology

of the environment; whether ‘economic’ processes such as farming, human ones such

as settlement patterns, or social ones such as political control marked out in landscape

features. Finally (a product of time and agency) is the issue of change, whether fast or

slow, continuous or intermittent, erosive or accretive, visible or not. It is change

through time that creates landscape diversity; it is the succession of historic processes

and their effects that create historic landscape character. The most dynamic

landscapes are often those most valued by people, and change can actually be seen as

one of the primary characteristics of landscape. Accepting this, of course, can make us

look again at our reaction to present and planned change.

HLC is first and foremost an exercise in ‘applied archaeology’, and this is one reason

why it is aligned so closely with the European Landscape Convention. It creates new

knowledge to help inform action, in particular landscape management and planning.

HLC is therefore less concerned with reconstructing the past than with understanding

the past in the present, in order to shape landscape’s future. In trying to achieve some

control over the future direction of landscape, however, HLC recognises that

landscape is an inter- and multi-disciplinary study and that’s its sustainable

management needs the work of many disciplines. HLC offers a contribution to this

greater whole whilst at the same time adding a landscape dimension to ARM.

Several detailed technical and methodological descriptions of HLC can found

published elsewhere, such as Herring 1998, Dixon et al1999, Dyson-Bruce 2002, Ede

2002, as well as the technical report of a review of HLC methodologies (Aldred and

Fairclough 2003), a discussion of HLC and GIS (Fairclough 2002a) and general

accounts of its aims and uses (Fairclough 2003c, Macinnes 2004). Specific issues

have been discussed, such as the relationship of HLC to sustainability (Fairclough

2003a), to spatial planning (Fairclough2002b) and to inter-disciplinarity (Fairclough

2003b). There are also more general accounts: one of the wider field of analysing

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historic landscape, but an account which relies heavily on HLC-type methods (Rippon

2004), and on presenting a range of European papers on similar topics, including

descriptions of the HLC in the counties of Hampshire and Lancashire (Fairclough and

Rippon (eds) 2002).

Only a summary is needed here, therefore. HLC is a map-based method of capturing,

at a small scale and with a degree of subjectivity and generalisation, an interpretation

of the present landscape’s historic and cultural dimensions. The aim is to explain why

- in terms of human actions – the landscape looks as it does, and as far as possible (in

the confines of the rapid, synthetic desk-based nature of the method) to explore its

past trajectories of change up to the present day as a starting point for helping to plan

its further course. Its interpretation is usually that of an archaeologist, but the method

is designed to be widened to capture multiple perspectives, and preferably including

popular non-expert views when they become available.

HLC operates now in GIS, which lends speed, the ability to ask multiple queries of

the data, an ability to cross-reference to other aspects. The superimposition of (say)

medieval townships and other cultural territories onto an HLC may reveal much about

patterns of historic land-use and settlement and their impact on the modern landscape;

or the analysis of SMR data with all of its inherent bias caused by discovery, survey

and research biases, for example against HLC can illuminate many of the patterns of

our data, from predictive survival to understanding why there are spatial or

chronological gaps in the records. GIS also allows great flexibility of output and

reporting: instead of a single map characterising the landscape, GIS can be

interrogated and combined with made possible by HLC’s role in spatial planning.

The use of GIS in HLC is relatively simple, however. A single layer of polygons is

normally used, each polygon defined by a predominant HLC type. HLC polygons are

therefore types not areas: they are repeated across an area, not specific to a place; they

are generic not discrete. Attached to each polygon is a complex database that records

attributes such as character of field patterns, whether it has woodland (and what type),

whether industrial activity is active or abandoned, and many others. Chronological

depth (‘time-depth’) is captured by recording similar attributes for what are termed

‘previous HLC characters’, for instance whether a modern golf-course sits on top of

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18th century designed parkland which in turn overlay medieval field patterns and so

on. Such knowledge of earlier landscape types might derive directly from historic

maps, which portray the more recent ‘layers’, or might be extrapolated from

‘signature’ morphology, such as sinuous S-shaped hedges indicating the previous (and

later mainly removed) enclosure of former open field strips of medieval date. More

sophisticated attributes of previous historic character can include a measure of

legibility (for instance, how legible are the medieval fields that sit below later

parkland), although for transparency’s sake some sort of indication is needed as to

whom it might be legible to (an expert in medieval landscape? a member of the

public?). Interrogation of this complex database allows modelling of past landscape

as well as the deconstruction of the present landscape in terms of historic process,

function and date.

HLC polygons (because of the grain and level of detail of the project) are not

homogenous areas; they are defined by a particular mix of types within them of which

one is clearly dominant. This allows a big picture to be formed without getting lost in

local particularities. It distinguishes HLC from detailed landscape archaeology, and

from simple mapping of the archaeological resource. HLC is thus an interpretative

and subjective summary.

HLC is consciously subjective although the subjectivity is made as a transparent as

possible, because it aims to distil current knowledge; it is not a branch of landscape

archaeology that is concerned with detailed field survey. Its first source material is the

landscape itself as revealed by maps and air photography, and supported by other

digital datasets (such as land cover or land use data). It treats the land as an artefact,

and from it, using archaeological techniques of reading material culture, interpreting

patterns and morphology, seeking stratification and sequence, focussing on change as

much as continuity and always prioritises human agency over environmental

determinism. It also takes its interpretative, subjective approach because it adopts the

view that landscape is perceptual: an ideational construct rather than an object. It is

composed of material things (that is, the ‘environment’ and all it contains, but

landscape is a cultural construct of heart, mind and senses that is built up out of those

material things. It follows therefore that landscape can be personal as well as

collective; there may be as many ‘landscapes’ in an area as there are people looking at

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it or thinking about it. But this relativity is complementary not exclusive, and as a tool

for management such an approach is more powerful for engaging people’s interest

and support.

This route does however lead to the view that areas of landscape should not be graded

or evaluated in terms of their intrinsic value because all landscape has value of some

sort, and in different contexts each landscape might be more valued than others. HLC

adopts the position, therefore, (as LCA does now as well Countryside Agency / SNH),

that evaluation and assessment are separate stages from characterisation which on its

own does not dictate any particular course of action whether preservationist,

interventionist or destructive). Assessment may be useful as a form of prioritisation,

but it should take place within the confines of a specific well-defined need such as

where to direct agri-environment funds for example, or establishing research agenda,

rather than be a catch–all indication of absolute value. Judgements are needed for

impact assessment for example (what will be the effect of a new motorway on that

landscape or this), but again that assessment must be ‘ring-fenced’, and made

appropriate to the question it is answering, not taken form the shelf as a list of the

‘best’ landscapes. Creating hierarchies of special or outstanding landscapes (an

approach which can work well for monuments or buildings for example, simple

categories of the historic environment where like can be like can be compared to like)

can when applied to landscape set up an unthinking resistance to change as opposed to

the informed and contextualised vision of future change which landscape requires if

its management is to be sustainable.

HLC, and other characterisation, and the reconsideration of ARM principles and

assumptions through a landscape not a monument prism leads to new ideas about

looking after the archaeological resource. Unlike monuments or buildings (in which to

an extent fabric can be preserved unchanged, as if in a museum), landscape needs to

change if it is to keep its long-lived character of being dynamic and the product of

past change. This is to accept that new developments may well lead to loss of historic

fabric. The aim at landscape scale may well be to maintain a landscape with a

diversity of historic character, and a landscape in which our successors can read and

understand their past, including our present period. Our own period could be a gap in

the landscape sequence, caused by reluctance to see the past change; or it could add

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new layers. One way of looking at the question is to think that (historic) landscape

character cannot be destroyed but only changed; the most positive question to ask is

not ‘what should we identify as so special that it must be kept unchanged’ but which

of various options of changed future character do we prefer.

Any aspect of landscape could be included in HLC, and the choice will need to vary

between different countries. In England, in general , the components it most builds on

are the broader historic dimension of the current landscape as exemplified by (in

England) its patchwork of walls and hedges defining fields of many different types

and date; the character, location and extent of upland and lowland unenclosed moor

and heath created and maintained by past human activity and often still containing

extensive visible remains of prehistoric farming and religious or funerary land-uses;

the distribution and human management of woodland, often confined in lowland

England to narrow valleys and the edges of farming parishes; or extensive areas of

industrially modified landscape deriving from past extractive industry. In other types

of landscape, in other countries, different ‘markers’ or indicators of landscape

character will need to be found, as is being done in the Bjäre peninsula in Scania

(Southern Sweden). The basic principles and methods of HLC should be transferable

to other countries, however.

Just as important as the actual patterns of landscape are the historic processes that

underlie the material record, and again these form part of HLC. Archaeological

features such as sites, buildings or gardens may be included, but usually (for reasons

of scale) only if very large. In the main, HLC does not build itself up from the point

data in Sites and Monuments Records (a difficult if not impossible task) but creates its

GIS data separately on the basis of broader patterns. This has the advantage of

avoiding circularity when using HLC to analyse SMR data in a predictive manner, for

example. Similar use of HLC correlated to township or estate boundaries can

illuminate historic spatial and territorial patterns. Similar use of HLC correlated to

township or estate boundaries can illuminate historic spatial and territorial patterns.

5. Case Study: the Shropshire Historic Landscape Characterisation Project.

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Located in the English West Midlands on its border with Wales, Shropshire is

England’s largest land-locked county, covering a total area of 3488 km². Its

landscape is highly diverse: even before taking account of the cultural overlay, it

reflects the variability of its geology with rocks from eleven of the thirteen geological

periods outcrop within the county. At a broader scale, this landscape has been divided

into six broad zones as part of the national pattern of character areas defined by the

Countryside Character map (Countryside Agency 1999). In the north, a plain formed

of undulating glacial drift, punctuated in places by low sandstone hills, extends

northwards beyond the county boundary into Cheshire. This area is bounded to the

west by the Oswestry Hills: an area of uplands largely formed of carboniferous rocks

which become progressively higher and more rugged when travelling westwards

towards the Welsh border. To the south, and separated by the broad valley of the

River Severn, lies a geological mixed series of ridges, separated by valleys and vales,

which run in a southwest-northwest direction. To the southwest, in the area known as

the Clun Forest, these hills become progressively higher and the valleys become

narrower and more convoluted. The Teme Valley, with its gentle topography and

apple orchards, forms much of the county’s southern boundary, whilst to the east the

Severn and a number of minor tributaries have carved a series of narrow, marshy

valleys through a low plateau of Triassic sandstone.

The Shropshire Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) Project was established as

a partnership between English Heritage and Shropshire County Council as part of

English Heritage’s national programme of HLC work to analyse the human history of

the country’s landscape. The survey phase of the project ran for three years, from

October 2001-December 2004, with the final report on this work due for completion

during 2005. The HLC mapping work and day-to-day project management were

undertaken by a project officer sitting within Shropshire County Council, who was

overseen by a steering group composed of representative from English Heritage,

Shropshire County Council and other key stakeholders.

The initial project design for the Shropshire HLC project sought an approach based on

that which had been pursued in Lancashire, a nearby county in NW England (Ede and

Darlington 2002). It was anticipated that the historic landscape character types that

had been identified in this county might be broadly applicable in Shropshire. Whilst

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innovative in its time, and exemplary in many respects, however, the Lancashire

project represented the method of a ‘third generation’ of HLC projects that had been

developed further in later projects such as those covering Somerset and Devon in SW

England (Aldred and Fairclough 2003). These advances in HLC theory and practice

meant that the final method used in Shropshire also drew heavily on the approach that

had been taken in Devon. Principal amongst these advances was the use of a

supporting database as an analytical tool to facilitate the definition of historic

landscape character types at the end of the data capture process, rather than at the

outset, thus incorporating a greater degree of flexibility and an increased ability to

adapt to new understanding as it develops.

In addition to the key principles behind HLC outlined above, two other factors played

a major role in shaping the design of the Shropshire project methodology. First, it had

to be closely compatible with that of Landscape Character Assessment (a separate

landscape character assessment which conformed to the guidance produced by the

Countryside Agency (CA/SNH 2002)), which was nearing completion as the

Shropshire HLC project was launched. Second, the results of the project had to be

capable of being used for a range of planning policy and land management

applications.

The project methodology used was based around two computerised databases: a GIS

map layer composed of HLC ‘polygons’ (the basic units of analysis) and a supporting

Microsoft Access database for capturing and analysing detailed information about

each of the polygons. Digital ,maps at 1:10,000 scale produced by the Ordnance

Survey (the UK’s national mapping agency) were used as the primary map base for

the project. Additional information was also provided by a number of other GIS

based datasets. The most important of these was an Ordnance Survey map series

dating to the late 19th century, which allowed the character of the landscape to be

determined prior to 20th century agricultural intensification, allowing areas where the

historic character has changed to be identified. Other GIS datasets used by the project

included digital and geo-referenced aerial photography, an inventory of historic

parklands, a layer showing the species composition of woodland, and an inventory of

ancient woodland.

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Analysis proceeded by defining HLC polygons that could be assigned to one of nine

basic HLC ‘attribute groups’: -

1. Unimproved (i.e. mainly unenclosed rough grazing) land

2. Fieldscapes (i.e. enclosed land or field patterns)

3. Woodland

4. Water and valley floor fields

5. Industrial and extractive (e.g. quarries or mines)

6. Military

7. Ornamental, parkland and recreational

8. Settlement

9. Orchards

Once a polygon had been defined and assigned to one of these basic categories,

further data in the form of a series of attributes specific to each basic type was

recorded for each (see table X). After data capture was completed, the range of

combinations in which these attributes occur was used to define a series of Historic

Landscape Character Types, which in themselves are based upon widely accepted

notions about the development of the British landscape. For example, a polygon

might be defined and assigned to ‘Fieldscapes’ attribute group. Data was then

captured about field size and shape, the nature of the boundaries and the number of

fields lost since the publication of the historic maps. Following the completion of

data capture, the attributes that had been allocated to the polygon (e.g. small- medium,

rectilinear fields with very straight boundaries) might be used to assign it to the

‘Planned enclosure’ HLC type, indicating that the fields pattern in question results

from a single episode of land division and enclosure whose boundaries were planned

on paper before being laid out in the field by surveyors. In Shropshire, and Britain

more generally, such field systems date to the period between the 17th and 19th

centuries and often represent the results of a Parliamentary Enclosure Act.

Table I – Detail of attributes used in the Shropshire HLC project

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Attribute Group Attribute

Enclosed (Yes/ No)

Elevation (higher ground [≥ 244m], lower ground [< 244m])

1. Unimproved Land

Type of ground (heathland, moorland, hill pasture)

Predominant field size (small, small-medium, medium-large, large-very large)

Predominant field shape (irregular, rectilinear)

Predominant boundary morphology (straight, sinuous, curvilinear)

Secondary boundary morphology (straight, sinuous, curvilinear, none)

Other internal boundary morphology (non, dog leg, s-curve, following watercourse,

co-axial)

Other external boundary morphology (sinuous, settlement edge, line of

communication [e.g. a road, canal or railway], woodland, none).

2. Fieldscapes

No. of fields lost since 1st ed 6" OS map

Nature of boundaries (straight, sinuous, curvilinear)

Is it present on the 1st Ed 6" OS map? (Yes/ No)

Is it designated as being ancient semi-natural (Yes/ No)

3. Woodland

Forestry Commission Indicative forestry designation (Broadleaved, Coniferous,

Felled, Mixed, Shrub, Young Trees, None)

Type (open water, raised bog/ 'moss', floodplain)

Degree of enclosure (fully enclosed, partly enclosed, unenclosed)

If open water is it natural (Yes/ No)

4. Water and Valley Floor

Fields

If man made is it (a lake/pond or reservoir)?

Type (stone quarry, gravel quarry, disused mine with associated spoil tips, industrial

complex or factory)

If a quarry is it active? (Yes/ No)

5. Industrial and extractive

If a disused mine with associated spoil tips, is it a former colliery or metal ore mine?

Type of installation (airfield, barracks, ordnance depot). 6. Military

Current use (abandoned, active but used for other purposes, still used by the

military)

7. Ornamental, parkland

and recreational

Type (garden or ‘designed’ landscapes, golf course, race course, sports field, other

parkland)

8. Settlement Type (historic [pre 1800], industrial [1800-1913], post-1914 [1914-1944], post-War

(1945-]).

9. Orchards Present on 1st ed. 6” OS map? (Yes/ No)

Where it could be determined on the basis of earlier maps that the historic character of

the polygon had changed, it was also possible to assign it to a category of ‘Previous

HLC type’. For instance, on the modern 1:10,000 map a polygon might be generated

to determine the limits of a plantation of coniferous woodland (HLC type –

‘Coniferous plantation’). On the historic maps, however, the same area might be

depicted as open moorland. Thus, it would be possible to allocate the previous HLC

17

type ‘Moorland’ to the same polygon. In this way, HLC is able to capture

information about ‘time depth’ in the landscape.

Over 30,000 HLC polygons were generated in Shropshire using this methodology,

ranging upwards in size from areas of 1ha. Analysis of the resulting data has enabled

58 HLC types to be defined for the county (Fig. 1). These can be used to produce a

colour coded GIS map layer, displaying the distribution and extent of each type.

Because of the analytical capabilities of GIS, HLC data can be used as the basis of

further queries and analysis. For example, to isolate all planned field systems that

were enclosed from former lowland heath. It is also capable of being used in

conjunction with the other categories of digital archaeological data stored in the

Historic Environment Record (formerly referred to as the Sites and Monuments).

Thus, for instance, one might wish to identify the different HLC types within which

Iron Age settlement enclosures survive as extant earthworks.

The results of the project demonstrate the great diversity of Shropshire’s landscape

(Fig. 2). The north Shropshire-Cheshire Plain, for example, defined as a single large

area in the national series of Character Areas, has in historic and archaeological terms

a complex and highly varied history and present-day character that is only partly

explained by the heterogeneous nature of the soils that have developed over the

geology. In this part of the county, a patchwork of wetlands and former lowland

heaths – commons and waste in the medieval period - exist in close proximity to

pockets of richer agricultural land, much of which was converted to pasture in the

post-medieval period.

Very extensive areas of common and waste were also reserved in the uplands of south

Shropshire, many lying within medieval forests (a legal designation that reserved the

right to hunt deer for the crown). The enclosure of these areas often began

informally, with the establishment of cottages and small holdings around the edges of

the common, but was completed by formal, surveyed enclosure funded by the larger

land owners, some of which was not carried out by agreement of its farmers but was

imposed by an Act of Parliament.

18

In contrast, better arable land is concentrated in the central and eastern parts of the

county, and in the vales in the south. These areas were more densely settled in the

medieval period, and as a result the arable land in common open fields in these areas

were much more extensive. Enclosure of these field systems was underway by the

end of the medieval period and largely complete by the 17th century, producing a

more irregular countryside of winding lanes, small hedged fields with sinuous

boundaries and quite villages. 19th century improvements and late 20th century

intensification of arable farming regimes has altered much of this pattern in central

and eastern Shropshire, but in the south the pace of change has been slower and many

areas exhibit a much greater degree of ‘time-depth’.

Shropshire County Council is now applying the results of the Shropshire HLC Project

for a variety of uses. Information from the HLC survey is currently being integrated

with another landscape character assessment maintained by the authority. This work

will inform a series of new planning policies, which the County Council is currently

developing. HLC data is also available to farmers to help them secure agriculture

subsidies to maintain the character of the landscape. In addition, the County Council

is providing HLC information to local communities to help them to increase their

understanding of their landscapes, and to aid them in making decisions about the parts

they wish to see protected.

6. Conclusions - Using HLC and the aims of landscape management

The uses and applications of HLC that are being explored in Shropshire are becoming

widely adopted across England wherever HLCs have been completed. Indeed, the act

of making an HLC, which involves a wide range of participants, is in itself the

beginning of a process of changing people’s understanding and attitudes to landscape

character and its past and present changes. The range of current uses has recently been

reviewed (Clark et al 2004). They fall under four main headings: using HLC to inform

active landscape management, the contribution of HLC to holistic landscape character

assessment and strategies, HLC as an important tool for all levels and types of spatial

planning, and HLC as the starting point for many forms of democratic partnership and

education.

19

In all these fields of application, there are several ways in which HLC can be used.

Most directly, it simply provides new broadly-based information and synthesis about

the historic environment. It also brings local as well as national significance into

focus, and admits the commonplace as well as the special into the heritage debate.

Furthermore, it postpones decisions about value and preservation to the point of need,

for example, when possible change is proposed. This enables impact to be assessed

and change to be measured, which is a more sophisticated and effective approach for

landscape than simply defining value against absolute criteria such as rarity or

condition (as is necessary in monument protection practice). HLC shows that

prioritisation (for example of distributing conservation resources or applying

protective controls) is not the same as evaluation. The characterisation method also

avoids being definitive, and of being the ‘last word’. Indeed, it aims to be provisional,

and to ask questions without necessarily offering answers; it prompts its users to

analyse and to make their own judgements.

In other words, characterisation and HLC brings a new flexibility and to heritage

management, which no longer needs to restrict itself only to sites, nor only to negatve

protection. In particular, using HLC puts the management of change alongside more

conventional techniques of protection. Character, the concepts of landscape as

perception and managing change (for example, in major strategic contexts such as

England’s Thames Gateway and other new ‘Housing Growth Areas’) complement

each other in the same way that discrete monuments lend themselves naturally to the

preservation of fabric. In projects such as these, the definition of sensitivity (or

capacity for change) in relation to proposed changes in landscape takes the place of

the simple definition of values.

At a stage (after about 10 years) when nearly two-thirds of England (and large parts of

Scotland) have been covered by HLC projects, it is possible to draw some conclusions

about value of HLC and the changed perspectives that it brings. First, of course, HLC

is a way of presenting archaeological understanding to broader, non-archaeological

audiences. It simultaneously contributes to the holistic landscape agenda while also

strengthening support for integrated archaeological resource management. It does this

by adopting a spatial and conceptual ’language’ that is common to many disciplines in

20

ways that the core of archaeological practice is not; its results are more accessible to

others, including the general public simply because they are set at landscape scale.

HLC is also proving capable of contributing to most methods of managing landscape,

and indeed to environmental management more generally. It does this not simply in

the field of protection but more significantly through the spatial planning system,

which as the European Landscape Convention makes clear, is one of the main

instruments for looking after landscape, achieving sustainable management or

ensuring that landscape plays its full part in social and personal life. But HLC can also

be a research tool, and there are now several examples of landscape research using

HLC as its starting point to create new detailed understanding.

HLC, more significantly, is also beginning to lead to new ideas about the objectives

and methods of heritage management. It focuses attention on the whole (landscape)

rather than on its parts (monuments, sites, landmarks), thus allowing management to

become more integrated and effective. It also focuses attention on character (on the

essence of a place) rather than on fabric, and it does so through the powerful lens of

people’s own perception rather than through imported value systems. Indeed, it places

context (both how something fits in its place, and how it contributes to its landscape)

alongside value. Because it seeks a territorially comprehensive rather than a

qualitative and selective view of the historic environment, it also places this aspect of

the historic environment (and of archaeology) as being beyond the reach of protection

or preservation–based tools (we cannot protect everything); instead it points towards a

wider but ‘softer’ approach of managing change. HLC expands the theory and

practice of archaeological resource management from protection to management as a

way of ensuring that the future shape and character of the landscape contains a legible

past. It shifts aspirations from stopping change in a few places to influencing change

everywhere within the landscape.

These new ideas also start to question some basic assumptions about the purpose of

heritage management, or at least offer alternatives to them. If three ideas are accepted

- that landscape is living and ever-changing, that it is a product of ever-changing

perceptions, and that there is neither profit nor practicality in trying to recreate past

landscape - the goals of heritage management become different. Archaeologists can

21

begin to use their understanding of landscape’s history, and of why it looks as it does

(all encapsulated within HLC), not merely to protect the remains of the past but to

start to influence the shape of future landscape. HLC holds out the possibility of

archaeology becoming a designing and a planning discipline, as well as a research

discipline. Archaeological approaches to landscape management do not have to adopt

the nostalgic assumptions of other disciplines; archaeologists know that landscape is

the product of past change and that new landscapes will become ‘archaeology’ very

soon.

Acknowledgements

Both authors are keenly aware of - and wish to thank - the large number of

colleagues and friends, too numerous to list, in EH and SCC and beyond within the

community of HLC practitioners that has been growing since 1993, whose work, help,

advice and support lies behind this short summary. The invention and development of

HLC, a sits continued evolution in England and their countries, has been a truly

collegiate process.

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Figures:

"Fig. 1. Historic Landscape Character types for Shropshire."

"Fig. 2. Historic Landscape Character map of Shropshire."