Participating in the Past: Landscape History and Local Research
4.8.4 Landscape History and Local Research
Although separating off ‘landscape history’ as a distinct category is a completely artificial division, it does enable a series of diverse approaches to be linked. The millennial year saw the production of countless published parish and town descriptions, drawing for instance on geology, history, buildings, photographs, botany, family history, fieldname collection, and oral history. Respondents referred to many activities revolving round town, parish or regional studies, some of which involved pure ‘research’ of the traditional kind, whilst others used field techniques such as photography and building recording. It is an area where constantly extending visions of the past bring once-undervalued topics – for instance the study of industrial landscapes and Second World War installations – into prominence.
The recording of landscape history requires skills which can operate at a relatively simple level, but which can be further refined and developed through training and the sharing of experiences as a number of respondents demonstrated. One example of a specific developable skill would be building recording, an activity strangely neglected in some regions but a fruitful potential source of new insights where local access and recording can transform knowledge. Although the ‘listing’ of buildings has for decades provided an authoritative framework for local building-conservation issues, the list is widely acknowledged not to be definitive as the descriptive process is based largely on the visible exterior of a building. Local access to the interior of listed structures and more detailed study, frequently provides surprises; occasionally this is even more the case with some externally unpromising and unlisted buildings. Moreover, much greater local and national attention is being given to the recording and documentary history of non-domestic structures, ranging from simple farm outbuildings to factories and gasworks. Areas of fruitful research have included studies of the development of parks and gardens, of boundaries, of field morphology etc.
Respondents reported some fruitful relationships between amateur and professional researchers, particularly through collaboration on landscape-scale projects covering larger areas than could be achieved by one individual or group. These collaborative efforts frequently also offer good training opportunities as well as promoting goodwill in the community. Metal detectorists have often been involved. Publication is a common objective, but the feeding of data to Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) is obviously a sensible interim step, together with consideration of the ultimate deposition of records.
