Reading the Land: How Historians Forgot the Landscape

This year marks seventy years since the publication of W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (1955), a work that played a central role in establishing an institutionalised understanding of ‘local history.’ Of course, local history had existed long before Hoskins, particularly in the work of early antiquarians. Beginning in the sixteenth century, William Lambarde’s A Perambulation of Kent (1576) became the first published county history in England, meticulously recording churches, monuments, and local customs. Antiquarians such as Lambarde laid the groundwork for understanding continuity and change in local communities, compiling hundreds of pages of observations that remain invaluable to historians today. 

These early works, however, have long faced criticism, and continue to do so. Many scholars chastise their frequent romanticisation of the landscape, with emphasis on ‘rolling fields,’ ‘furrowed acres,’ and the picturesque qualities of the author’s surroundings. Such aesthetic focus often sits uneasily alongside the quantitative expectations that institutionalised historical study has increasingly demanded. Yet in abandoning this romantic perspective, we risk losing one of the most immediate and accessible archives available to historians: the natural landscape itself. 

Hoskins, more than any of his contemporaries, understood this. He argued that to comprehend fully the history of a place, its people, or its events, a historian must engage not only with documentary sources but also with the physical geography and natural features of the landscape. In his view, history was inseparable from the ground on which it unfolded. As he wrote, ‘No book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have.’ This conviction prompted Hoskins to explore everything from field systems and trackways to the loss and reclaiming of marshes, the clearance of woodlands, and the transformative impact of nineteenth-century canals and railways. 

The landscape, in this sense, is a living archive. Ridge-and-furrow fields preserve the imprint of medieval agriculture; sunken lanes, or hollow ways, mark centuries of passage; parish boundaries and ruined churches trace patterns of settlement, devotion, and social hierarchy. By walking through these spaces, a historian does more than observe: they experience the land’s contours, rhythms, and textures, reading history with the body as well as the mind. Following a Roman road or medieval droveway, for instance, offers a tangible sense of continuity with those who walked, ploughed, or drove livestock centuries before. In this sense, seeing is believing, and you do not need to enter a trance to imagine the world of the past, just walking these paths, fields and trackways offers a real insight into their history. 

Since the beginning of time, human needs haven’t changed much, and neither have our powers of reasoning. Imagine walking along a footpath through a field and wondering how old it might be. Take a trackway unaltered for over 500 years, appearing even on the earliest maps. It skirts a marshland, once far wetter than today, and connects two settlements perched on high ground, sheltered from the wind. How old is this path? Saxon, Roman, perhaps even prehistoric Bronze Age? By looking closely at the landscape – even after centuries of ploughing and industrial change – you can begin to spot patterns. If this was the only route between the settlements, it’s reasonable to assume the trackway is at least as old as the communities it links. True or not, these small discoveries, however trivial they may seem, offer anyone genuine opportunities to truly think about and consider their own immediate surroundings. 

Walking through landscapes also opens the imagination to what is absent. Abandoned villages, deserted priories, and eroded earthworks do not merely signal what once was; they evoke the lives, labours, and memories that shaped them. This interplay of presence and absence is central to understanding the historical significance of place. The land itself speaks, if one knows how to listen. In this way, walking becomes a method of historical inquiry – a dérive through space and time – where imagination complements documentary evidence, and observation deepens interpretation. 

Therefore, the romanticism criticised in early antiquarians is, in fact, part of what makes their work so compelling, and so valuable. Descriptions of ‘furrowed acres’ or ‘rolling fields’ are not mere aesthetic flourishes; they reflect an attentiveness to the physical and human traces embedded in the land. Hoskins inherited this sensibility but combined it with rigorous scholarship, demonstrating that the romance of the landscape can coexist with analytical history. By reading the land carefully, historians can trace changes in agriculture, transport, and settlement, while also appreciating the texture of daily life across centuries. 

In the end, the landscape is both a source and a method. Its fields, paths, and trackways contain stories that documents alone cannot convey, and walking through them allows these stories to emerge in a way that is visceral, immediate, and personal. Hoskins’ work reminds us that the historian’s task is not merely to catalogue facts but to inhabit the spaces in which history occurred, to sense their rhythms, and to interpret their significance in full. In retracing these paths today, we are participating in the same act of observation and imagination that has connected generations of antiquarians to the land: reading the earth as an archive, step by step. 

Bibliography 

Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). 

 Hoskins, W. G., English Landscapes (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973). 

 Lambarde, William, A Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the Description, Hystorie, and Customes of that Shyre (London: Ralph Newbery, 1576). 

Tilley, Christopher, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994).