The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Landscape and townscape from AD 1500
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The final phase of enclosure in England and Wales occurred from the mid-eighteenth century
to the early nineteenth, with four-fifths of the activity concentrated into short bursts in the 1760s
and 1770s, and during the French wars from 1793 to 1815. Estimates of the amount of land
involved run to as much as 2.73 million ha of common field arable. This amounts to some 21 per
cent of England, a huge area that nevertheless emphasizes how much enclosure had already
taken place, much of it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Parliamentary Enclosure of
upland waste changed the landscapes of many parts of northern and western England, with
regular fields on the fellsides bounded by stone walls contrasting with the smaller, irregular pattern
of earlier enclosures in the valleys. Some 0.9 million ha were involved. Although Parliamentary
Enclosure acts operated at the level of the individual parish, the use of standardized procedures
for surveying the ground and marking out the new allotments produced a distinctive uniformity
of landscape, with square and rectangular fields bounded by hawthorn hedges and wide, straight
access roads. As new compact farms replaced fragmented, open field holdings, farmsteads located
in villages were moved out to the new compact holdings. The landscape of thousands of parishes
was transformed within five years or so. Sometimes, however, Parliamentary Enclosure followed
the boundaries of the former open field strips, preserving their gentle reverse-S shaped curves in
the modern field pattern (Turner 1980).
Between 1660 and 1695, the Scottish Parliament passed a series of acts encouraging estate
improvement, particularly enclosure and the division of commonties, pastures in shared ownership
between two or more landowners. The face of the countryside was transformed by the new,
rational planned landscapes. New farmsteads of superior design were built. Planned estate villages,
acting as local market centres and foci for rural industry, were established in large numbers. The
old farming system, even in the most fertile parts of Lowland Scotland, had included much
uncultivated land. With improvement, much additional land was brought under cultivation,
especially on the divided commonties, while reclamation of lowland peat bogs, as in the Carse of
Stirling, also had a great impact on the landscape.
In the southern and eastern Highlands, agricultural improvement and landscape change began
earlier in the eighteenth century and proceeded more gradually than further north, creating a
balanced farming system with larger farms and smaller crofts. Surplus population readily found
work in nearby Lowland towns. In the far north and west, however, change came later and more
catastrophically. The traditional farming system began to intensify under the impact of population
pressure from the sixteenth century onwards, leading in some areas to the abandonment of
plough cultivation in favour of hand tillage. The clearance of people from interior glens to make
way for the new sheep farms led to the creation of planned crofting townships on the coast,
frequently using land that had not previously been cultivated. The geometric layout of crofting
townships, sometimes involving the realignment of existing runrig touns on the same ground but
in other instances laid out fresh, are still a prominent feature of the landscape of the Hebrides
and the West Highlands (Whyte and Whyte 1991).
In the early nineteenth century, high grain prices encouraged an expansion of cultivation
throughout Britain. Straight ridge and furrow in moorland and upland fringe areas often marks
this phase of temporary, opportunist cropping. Much land remained in cultivation through to the
mid-nineteenth century. During this period of ‘high farming’, there was tremendous investment
in land improvement, including undersoil drainage, along with the construction of new architectdesigned
steadings and improved farm workers’ cottages on many estates, a legacy that is still
evident in the landscape today.
From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, there was an evolution in the appearance of the
parks surrounding country houses (Currie and Locock 1993). Before the mid sixteenth-century,