Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
For convenient reference the Areas - numbered 1 to 16 - are grouped into five
Regions
. Each Region forms a chapter and starts with a general introduction:
CHAPTER
REGION
AREA
1
West Cornwall
2
East Cornwall and South Devon
3
North Devon and West Somerset
Chapter 4
Southwest
4
East Devon, Somerset and Dorset
5
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight
6
Sussex
7
East Sussex and Southeast Kent
Chapter 5
South Coast
8
Bristol
9
The Cotswolds and the Middle
Severn
Chapter 6
Severn Valley
10
The Cotswolds to Reading
11
London
12
The Thames Estuary
London and the Thames Val-
ley
Chapter 7
13
Northampton to Cambridge
14
Suffolk and North Essex
15
Leicester to the Fens
16
Norfolk
Chapter 8
East Anglia
Even the Area building blocks are relatively large, with arbitrary boundaries, and
it has generally been helpful to discuss smaller areas within and across these boundar-
ies that are based on natural features of the scenery (Fig. 4). I have called these smaller
areas
Landscapes,
because they are characterised by distinctive features, usually re-
flecting aspects of the bedrock or distinctive events in their evolution.
These Landscapes correspond closely to area divisions of England that were
defined by the Government Countryside Agency (www.countryside.gov.uk). This
scheme divides England into 159 'character areas' on the basis of natural features of
the scenery along with aspects of its human settlement, past and future development,
land use and vegetation and wildlife, so they are likely to be familiar divisions to many
readers of the New Naturalist series. Other Government agencies (particularly the De-
partment for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) that administer the funding of land
management use the same character area division.
