How the Land Lies: The Origins of Regular Landscapes in the English Lowlands

Challenges the assumption that regular historic landscapes result from deliberate planning, showing that topography, drainage, and gradual expansion often shaped their apparent order.

The assumption that regular landscapes containing seemingly ordered arrangements of boundaries and lanes could only arise through deliberate planning has been a central pillar of 'relict field systems' - the survival of organised prehistoric and Roman field systems in the framework of the medieval and modern landscape. Similar ideas underpin arguments for the planned origins of open fields. How the Land Lies argues that the notion that regularity must indicate landscape planning is flawed without careful consideration of the environmental context. Combining archaeological, historical and environmental sources in a number of case studies, this book presents evidence for the importance of topography, drainage and environment to the location and direction of boundaries in lowland England.