Identifying and protecting historic landscapes

Six years ago, Darvill and colleagues reported (A NTIQUITY 61: 393–408) on the Monuments Protection Programme, a new English initiative to build, from a century of haphazard acts of site protection, a set of balanced judgements and priorities by which to recognize ancient places that are more precious, genuinely of a national importance. The Programme, they tell A NTIQUITY , has now completed the first-stage review of information in local sites and monuments records and is proceeding with the identification of nationally important monuments in every English county. This further paper reports on how the Monuments Protection Programme is addressing landscapes, as distinct from ‘spot sites’ with clear limits, where the matters of defining a ‘relict cultural landscape’ and judging relative value are harder.