The Archaeology Service of Gloucestershire County Council Environment department is undertaking an historic landscape assessment of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), for the MPP. The area comprises 2,038 sq km of limestone upland transected by deep river cut valleys and extends from Bath, in the south, to Edge Hill, near Banbury, in the north; although most of the designated area falls within the eastern part of Gloucestershire, substantial portions are also found in Avon, Hereford and Worcester, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, and Wiltshire. Historic landscape Assessment has already been undertaken or is in progress in Cornwall, the Peak District National Park, Derbyshire, and in the former county of Avon, which included c200 sq km of the Cotswolds AONB. The Cotswold assessment is intended to provide a fairly rapid view of the historical character of the Cotswolds landscape, rather than a detailed landscape history and data collection is largely limited to a number of identified written and map sources which provide broadly uniform levels of information across the whole of the assessment area. The methodology is based on that already in use in Avon in which the present landscape is categorised in terms of the date of origin of the dominant landscape form, generally derived from the predominant enclosure pattern or land cover, and the principal historic land use from which it was derived.
The landscape history of the Cotswolds is fairly complex and during much of the medieval period the area was dominated by open field agriculture which has largely obliterated all evidence of earlier enclosure patterns. The extent of the cultivated open fields varied considerably throughout this period and it is particularly difficult to identify areas of permanent pasture or meadowland, as relict ridge and furrow survives in many of the level flood plains, steep valley sides, or high wold tops, which would have been most suitable for such use. Some large areas of un-enclosed common pasture survive, mainly on the higher ground in the western part of the assessment area, although few of these are known to have been solely used for grazing throughout the medieval period, and a number were wooded at that time. From the fourteenth century (and in some areas even earlier) open field agriculture declined and large areas of the open fields, either reverted to, or were converted to, permanent pasture to support the expanding Cotswolds wool industry. The precise limits between late and post-medieval sheep pasture and open fields is generally obscured by the pattern of large regular fields, usually bounded by dry stone walls, which represent the organised (generally Parliamentary) enclosure of the remaining open fields and pastures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which are the predominant enclosure pattern of much of the eastern part of the Cotswolds. Evidence of more piecemeal enclosure, generally by local arrangement from the fifteenth century, is represented by smaller, less regular fields, which frequently reflect elements of the preceding open field system, and are often bounded by thick hedges. These are found throughout the assessment area, but are most common in the western Cotswolds, particularly in the area of the Stroud and Painswick valleys and the Cotswolds escarpment along the eastern edge of the Severn Vale.
Agriculture is not the only historical factor which has influenced the present landscape of the Cotswolds, and large post-medieval limestone quarries are common, particularly along the Cotswold escarpment at the western edge of the assessment area. With the exception of moderately sized market towns, many of the settlements retain their early-nineteenth-century character, although considerable post-medieval linear development is evident in the Stroud valley, meeting the housing needs of the increasing industrial population of the area at that time.
The initial landscape characterisation is being undertaken on film overlays of the most recent 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map base, although the results will be digitised onto a GIS system to enable reproduction at different scales, or present any combination of identified landscape character types. This information will be used as the basis of a landscape character map of the whole of the assessment area, and a written report will appraise the project methodology and discuss the landscape types identified in the course of the assessment. The project is currently scheduled for completion by November 1998.
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