Making Sense of an Historic Landscape - Stephen Rippon

London: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hardback, 416 pages
416 pages; 100 illus. 8 pp color plates; 9.2 x 6.1

by, Frank Edgerton Martin

Making Sense of an Historic Landscape is a broad geographic study of a relatively small English region. Author and landscape archaeologist Stephen Rippon’s overall goal is to study the balance between “environmental determinism” and human “social agency” in shaping a landscape. He explores this difficult question through the lens of a specific region divided by a geographic range called the Blackdown Hills that runs between Somerset and Devon in southwest England.

Is it the “luck” of settling on good farming soils with reliable water sources that adds up to a prosperous region? Does topography directly determine the location of roads and communities? Making Sense of an Historic Landscape argues that ecology and climate matter, but there are also other, less physical but equally important variables in regional character. The challenge is to understand the ecology, local culture, and human perception of landscapes as a whole.

Rippon studies the Blackdown Hills in southern England as a potentially decisive boundary in landscape character from prehistory onwards with a deep focus on the last 500 years. He sees this project as a specific case study that can be applied as a model for other regions, presumably far beyond the United Kingdom.

 After many centuries of habitation, the shape of fields, place-names, and styles of house design are noticeably different either side of the Blackdown Hills. Rippon suggests that these differences reflect a diversity of local cultures that somewhat surprisingly endure across much of southern England, even in the Internet Age. His approach to “making sense” of historic landscapes—their similarities, contrasts, and regional variations—borrows techniques from many geographic sub-specialties including: soils mapping, place names, and local comparisons of vernacular building forms. None of these techniques is new, yet rarely has someone applied them all together in such depth to study such a relatively small area.

 Rippon chose the Blackdown Hills and the lands on either side of them because their housing types, settlement patters, and village forms are so different. Dividing Devonshire from Somerset, the sparsely populated Blackdown Hills have been protected as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) since 1991. In contrast to the dense village network to the east, the western edge of Rippon’s study area is Dartmoor, a vast open wilderness home to one of Britain’s most famous national parks, novels of intrigue and romance, and a rich folklore tradition of supernatural spirits.

 In the first pages, Rippon expresses his goal “to expand on the traditional academic preoccupation of characterizing landscape in terms of their settlement patterns and field systems, and to try to understand the ways that people in the past have expressed their identities through standing buildings, the language of landscape (field- and place-names), agricultural practices, and the territorial structures within which they lived” (p. 3). 

 For most people outside academia, all this seems to make sense. Yet, such a multi-disciplinary approach is all too rare in British (and we might presume) American landscape studies. Rippon points out that scholars in each of these layers of landscape character tend to have their own journals and conferences and that one of the aims of this study is to break down these barriers.

 The book includes over fifty maps of the Blackdown Hills regions that document these many layers of cultural and ecological resources. The core chapters embrace: human perception, settlement patterns, house forms, fieldscapes, Roman and medieval cultivation and husbandry, and place names.  Building toward the greater whole that Rippon seeks, these sections are exhaustive and often exhausting to read unless one is directly engaged in the area discussed. Yet, for the purpose of testing the balance between environmental and social agency, their detail is a worthwhile effort.

 For landscape architects, long acquainted with regional mapping and “the overlay” technique dating back at least to Warren Manning, such a composite approach to landscape analysis is not new. What is somewhat new is Rippon’s full-spectrum approach. Beyond the ecology of soils, slopes, and vegetation—and beyond the cultural geography of human-made elements such as hedgerows and road patterns studied in W.G. Hoskins's masterful "The Making of the Landscape"(1955)—Rippon looks to a “conceptual” record of landscape. He seeks to document how people in the distant and more recent past perceived the locales on either side of the Blackdown Hills.

Many American readers may be somewhat limited in our understanding of Rippon’s field of landscape archaeology (largely taught in Britain) and the millennia of British history that he incorporates in this multi-disciplinary study. Yet, his perception of the field of landscape history is also very Anglo-centric with almost no mention of the remarkable 20^th century legacy of American cultural geographers beginning with Carl Sauer in the 1920s and leading up through the work of Yi-fu Tuan and J.B. Jackson whose interest in maps was deepened by his work with Allied Intelligence in World War II.

Because of this oversight, Rippon gives the mistaken impression that the field of cultural landscape preservation and history began only recently. “The term ‘historic landscape’,” he writes, “first came into use as recently as the early 1990s as a concept developed by archaeologists to advise planners and countryside managers of the historical depths present in the modern landscape (p. 54). For an American reader, this claim reads patently false given the fact that such academic groups as the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation was founded in the 1970s with the active participation of landscape architects. Their writings, like those of Tuan and others, explore the ideas of “place attachment”, vernacular landscapes, and the expressions immigrant cultures in the built landscape.

By Rippon’s inclusion of folklore and literature in his study, these geographic voices and those of such continental phenomenological writers as Gaston Bachelard are present at least in spirit. To capture the landscape of memory and its transmission through writing, Rippon cites travel accounts from writers such as Daniel Defoe to 19^th century Board of Agriculture reports.

He quotes a landscape description from the writer Celia Fiennes who, between 1682-1698, traveled the region and described its contrasts and vistas that survive to this day.  On the eastern fringes of the Blackdown Hills, she described the area around Chard as “such an enclosed country and narrow lanes you cannot see a bow shot before you.” After traveling through Somerset, she found a very different landscape when arriving into Devonshire over “a high ridge of hills which discovers a vast prospect on each side full of enclosures and lesser hills…you could see vast tracts of ground full of enclosures, good grass and corn beset with quicksets and hedge rows.” (p. 39)  Set probably at Maiden Down, a watershed line between two valleys, such an early description conveys how important watersheds were and are in creating regions of distinct local character.

Ultimately, Rippon concludes that both the natural environment and human agency matter in the long-term shaping of cultural landscapes. This finding seems hardly surprising even though it has long been a subject of debate. More surprising and largely unresolved in this study are the conundra: why do local areas throughout southern England continue to retain the same identities and variations that they have held for centuries? Why is change in perception and building forms so slow?

Rippon’s academic influence runs deep, if not far beyond the UK; and this study is documented with hundreds of footnotes and references that show the depth of his study. One wonders if the same sharp and enduring contrasts in local landscapes would apply to North America. For landscape architects and preservation historians, many of the analysis techniques are valid here, but practitioners must ask: are they really relevant for our work? Is the fine-grained mosaic of the English countryside an appropriate model for vast American spaces?

I believe that this detailed study is relevant if taken as a methodological model that can be adapted to specific projects. For the United States, these historic landscape planning subjects include: National Heritage Areas (NHAs), Scenic Byways, National Parks and Forests.

Covering much of two English counties, Rippon’s study area is somewhat similar to an American NHA in both its scale and its wealth of eras. There are now roughly fifty NHAs across the country; and because they emphasize grassroots participation, regional stories, conservation, preservation, and interpretation through networks of independent sites, they are at the forefront of American historic preservation. They also involve no federal land ownership, a key issue in these days of Property Rights debates.

I found Rippon’s study to be most relevant for my own historic landscape preservation work at this regional scale, especially for the Freedom’s Frontier NHA that extends over much of western Missouri and eastern Kansas. As the site of the Border Wars that led up to the Civil War, this region was divided not by a mountain range but by an arbitrary political boundary between slave and free states.

A few years ago, I worked with landscape architects from Jeffrey L. Bruce & Company to create a management plan that was one of the first to begin a management strategy for natural and human resources through understanding pre-settlement ecology. Like Rippon’s exploration of the roles of nature and human agency in shaping the Blackdown Hills region, National Heritage areas can become a crucible for such research.

By studying ecological systems and geology at the regional scale and asking why town sites, skirmishes, types of agriculture, and pioneer trails happened where they did, Freedom’s Frontier’s new management plan creates logical connections between natural and human history and why some Border War conflicts may have happened where they did. This type of integrated approach could not have happened without my collaboration as a historian with landscape architects who were able to document and visually convey overlapping natural and human systems. By connecting natural resources such as wetlands, soils, and streams with historic sites, planners can make stronger arguments and targeted strategies for protecting both.

 

Like the “nature versus nurture” debate in pedagogy, we may never know how much of the character of a specific historic landscape reflects a legacy of pre-settlement ecology and how much it is a direct expression of sheer human will and choices made. Perhaps, we never will have a full understanding of why some places change so slowly. But, for landscape architects and planners who often manage historic resources and fragile ecologies, these puzzles can enrich our study of why and how a landscape came to be what it is today.