Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Every weekend, thousands of people take a walk in the English countryside. A walk in the country is about exercise, but it is also much more than that. It is enabled by the tracks and paths, the public rights of way over private property. The surrounding scenery is of fields, hedges, grasslands, moorlands, studded by the spires and towers of medieval churches, and the distant prospect of Georgian houses amidst parklands.

All these elements are and were human creations...Read More

Making a Home : The Public Value of the Humanities : Bloomsbury Academic

Aerial Phoography of Laxton

Laxton from the Air

Both Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps have useful aerial imagery of Laxton. Look in particular for he shadows of subtle earthworks on the Bing Maps image.

Google Maps

Microsoft Bing Maps

Novelist William Boyd on Re-Reading Hokins

William Boyd: Rereading The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins

Novelist William Boyd discusses rereading Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape for Guardian Books.  Hoskins provided his readers with an innovative lens through which the history of the English countryside could be decoded – and inspired in me an enduring fascination with the land around me, says William Boyd in Guardian Books  [Read More]

The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

A perfect up to date counterpoint to Hoskins. Pryor quickly shows, the neolithic, iron and bronze ages are really not [empty] at all. Under his gaze, the landscape starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today. Pryor shows us bumpy ridges, the kind of thing you might ignore on an afternoon's walk, which turn out to be the surface traces of bronze age fields, together with some untidy stumps that are actually the remains of a buried forest. Kathryn Hughes The Guardian. (Read Full Review).

Class 2: Darkening Hills

The Slides for Class 2, Dakening Hills, can be downloaded from here.