Reconstructing the ‘Wildscape’; Thorne and Hatfield Moors Hidden Landscapes’

View Across Hatfield Moors’ cotton grass vegetation (photo: Peter Roworth copyright, with permission)
Fig 1: View Across Hatfield Moors’ cotton grass vegetation (photo: Peter Roworth copyright, with permission)

This HLF-funded project (2016-2021) is concerned with understanding how people in the past, lived, moved and exploited previously common British wetland landscapes, lost over recent centuries, and how these relationships shaped people, places and ecosystems, both past and the present. Using the Humberhead Levels (S Yorkshire and N Lincolnshire) as a case study, we take a deep historical approach to investigating the environmental, archaeological, cultural and historical context of the region from the early Holocene to the present day, recognising the integrated nature of these landscapes.

Our focus is on the rich wetland environments found alongside the old rivers, meres and islands, to understand how they been shaped by water-land connections in the past and imagined within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural texts, oral histories and maps and then disconnected by historical drainage, land reclamation, modern land practises, and poor social and economic opportunities. By advancing a transdisciplinary understanding of these wetlands, the project forms a link between cultural history, scientific research and environmental priorities while communicating a sense of cultural identity and fostering ownership of a disappearing wetland heritage.

View across the drainage landscape of the Levels
Fig 2: View across the drainage landscape of the Levels

https://projectwildscape.wordpress.com

Aims of the Project

Project members

Relevant outputs from the group