Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER THREE
THE COUNTRYSIDE: LANDSCAPES IN TIME
If the landscape is its own map for those who know how to read it, maps themselves offer
guided views of the landscapes they portray. They allow us to survey larger areas such as
counties and provinces, and to appreciate the fine detail of change and continuity in localities.
They give clues to help unlock the mysteries of the countryside by providing evidence that
features existed and what they looked like at a point in time, and they help us to picture how
people lived and worked in past places. Where new towns have arisen and cities expanded
over the centuries, earlier maps serve as a record of fields and woods before they were lost
under a sea of brick and stone.
Maps of the countryside show what the mapmaker was commissioned to include. The 17th
and 18th centuries were the golden age of manuscript estate maps, which are of ten highly
decorative symbols of status and power. A new class of professional surveyors were employed
by a single landowner or by bodies such as charities, colleges, companies or the Crown. Lands
of ten changed hands in these centuries of political upheaval, when backing the wrong cause
could lead to loss of one's estate as well as one's head, as we see in a Northumberland case
(
A confiscated Jacobite estate
)
. The map of Audley End
Across four centuries; triumphs and
disasters
was made to celebrate Charles II's acquisition of that quasi-palace. These large-scale
estate maps, with accompanying written surveys which detail fields, tenants, rents, and crops
grown, together informed good estate management. But these maps offer only a partial view
of a piece of countryside. Names of adjacent landowners may be shown, but not their lands.
Only more attractive features were included, not dunghills and eyesores.
Britain's expanding empire overseas opened up new lands and new landscapes to be sur-
veyed. The estate map was transported and transformed as a land-grant plat or a plantation
plan of new-cut colonial lands. The style and layout of these maps were similar, whether in
Georgia or South America, as we can see from the maps on pages 90 and 88. However, they
record a more exotic type of native trees and plants, with crops such as sugar, coffee, indigo
and rice. Whether at home or abroad, estate maps tell a specific story about the ownership,
exclusivity and productivity of a limited area, reflecting a social structure based on the land.
Other maps record man-made changes in the landscape such as drainage schemes (the map
The dangers of decoration
)
, the making of canals and railways, or modernisation by enclosure
to make large fields instead of small medieval farming strips.
