The History of the Countryside

Oliver Rackham is to historical landscape ecology what W.G. Hoskins is to landscape history.

More than anyone else, Rackham had the vision to understand that the pattern of woods, fields, hedges, moors, and marshes that defines the English countryside, although seemingly natural, was in fact created by a delicate and constantly shifting balance between human intervention and geological, climatological and ecological influences. 

The Chiltern beechwoods I’ve enjoyed walking in since childhood, for example, exist partly because the timber was valuable for the chair-making industry that once flourished there, while the species-rich hay meadows of Swaledale that entranced me on a… show more.

This classic study of the creation of the modern British landscape by a revered historical ecologist draws on everything from pollen counts to the Domesday Book. Along the way, Rackham explodes dozens of common myths about what Great Britain used to be like, employs archaeology for very practical purposes, and demonstrates the astonishing resilience of plants and trees. Every time I look at Rackham’s work I see new ways to apply it to the Pacific Northwest.

This book by Oliver Rackham, the doyen of British landscape history, offers the reader a detailed and more chronologically specific discussion to accompany and in many respects to illustrate the argument in Neil Roberts’s The Holocene. If you want to understand the long process of landscape evolution, the amazing continuities, and deep structures of the British landscape, this is the perfect book. Through detailed discussion of the sources, written, archaeological and environmental, the author presents a topic-by-topic study of every aspect of the British countryside and its deep history, from the Neolithic to the present. I thought I understood… show more.