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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."
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