The settlement pattern of England and the variety of landscapes which people living in those settlements have created have long been recognised as a very rich palimpsest produced by many factors, economic, social, and political, as well as geological, over a period of some 5,000 years. If we are to manage our legacy of historic settlements effectively, we need to understand this patterning in order to be sensitive to these subtle, but crucial, regional distinctions.
The aim of a recent English Heritage project undertaken by Dr Brian Roberts of the University of Durham and Dr Stuart Wrathmell of the West Yorkshire Archaeology Service has been to try and characterise these subtle regional variations and to map the results. The work has set out to understand and define (`characterise') in a practical way what exactly is different between historic settlements in different regions of the country. The role of `characterisation' in historic landscape assessment has already been recognised by English Heritage and forms the basis of several projects which are currently under way.
The key fundamental distinction between settlement patterns is between `nucleated' and `dispersed' settlement. The main characteristics of these two types have now been defined and the distribution of these characteristics mapped for the first time, to show the spectrum of settlement types nationally, ranging from those areas where almost all settlements are nucleated to those where almost all are dispersed. The results are fascinating. It has long been known that the central area of the country, the `champion lands' of seventeenth-century topographers, was very different in character from the territories to east and west. Now we have been able to define exactly where the boundaries of this distinctive `central province' lie. We can show, for the first time, that the two provinces to the south-east and to the north-west, west, and south-west of this central province have entirely different patterns of settlement. In both of these areas `dispersed settlement' is the dominant form, although in more favoured locations some villages and towns are present.
But this is not all. The three provinces are not homogeneous, but show a variety of different settlement characteristics within them. When we look at other indicators of settlement pattern, such as what sort of field system was associated with the settlements, or how intricate the road system is, we can also see `characteristics' which can be defined and mapped. The distinctions between `sub-provinces' are influenced to some extent by geology, but geology is only one of the significant details. 23 such `sub-provinces' have been defined. Even this, however, is not the maximum resolution possible; it has also proved possible to detect, through the use of a simple statistical model, variations in the size and density of dispersed settlement units which allow division of the sub-provinces into 180 `local regions'. The methodology used to define all three levels of distinction is clearly vital and the methodology itself has already been published. We hope, moreover, to re-publish the methodology along with a variety of the maps, a characterisation of each province, sub-province, and region in the form of a settlement `Atlas', in the near future.
This new series of maps has already served one practical conservation function: it has provided the justification for the selection of medieval and later settlement sites for statutory protection through the Monuments Protection Programme. Stuart Wrathmell has used this new division of the country into settlement zones as the basis of his argument for selection of nearly 2000 medieval and later settlements sites for assessment for scheduling. Now that we can characterise the distinctions between settlement zones, we are able to make the argument that some of the rarer settlement site types should also be included on the schedule as well as the more `classic' deserted, nucleated, settlement sites in the central province. As we can now compare like with like, in future it will be possible to schedule medieval settlement sites effectively in counties such as Cheshire and Hertfordshire, which hitherto were under-represented in the Schedule of Ancient Monuments.
But valuable as this use is, it should not obscure the wider significance of this characterisation and mapping project. In future, many aspects of research and management will be enhanced by use of these maps. The maps have been generated using the earliest complete, standardised mapping of England - by the Ordnance Survey in the early nineteenth century. Consequently, although we now know that these distinctive patterns were in existence at that date, this project of itself does not tell us when, or why, these settlement patterns actually originated. Any one of the 180 distinct local regions which the present project defines will have a complex settlement history, now visible in, for example, a predominance of dispersed medieval farmsteads set in small irregular fields (as in parts of Kent or Herefordshire) by which it is distinguished from its neighbours, where the hedges may be mostly of the parliamentary enclosures and the farms of eighteenth- century date. This situation will have arisen through a whole variety of influences (social, economic, and political as well as geological) which came to bear on the landscape at different dates through history. With the completion of this project, the challenge is laid for historic settlement and historic landscape studies in the future to design further work in every local region, in order to test and understand the development of the distinctive settlement pattern we have started to define, and relate that pattern to its distinctive landscape, so that what remains of that distinctiveness today - its local character, its regional diversity, and its historical and archaeological interest - can be properly managed.
![[Go to Contents Page]](contents.gif)