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Home > Landscape history Trees and Orchards > The Orchards of Eastern England
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The Orchards of Eastern England

History, ecology and place

Author: Tom Williamson, Gerry Barnes

Price: £16.99 £13.59 (free p&p)

"

“This book is a significant and important contribution to the landscape history of Eastern England.”

-Charles Watkins,
Landscape History

About the book

“… supremely well-written and intriguing…” Terry Mabbett, Forestry Journal

“As David Lowenthal wrote, ‘the past is a foreign country’ and, as such, it is implicitly hard to decipher. To journey back into this foreign place and thus to understand its history, evolution and even decline requires a multi-disciplinary approach, as demonstrated in this book so effectively by Barnes and Williamson. Finally, the book is lavishly illustrated with numerous full-colour plates and at £16.99 is excellent value.” Ian D. Rotherham, Landscapes Journal

Although the history of orchards and fruit varieties is of great popular interest, there have been few academic treatments of the subject. This book presents results from a three-year project, ‘Orchards East’, investigating the history and ecology of orchards in the east of England.

Together, the eastern counties of Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk have a tradition of fruit cultivation comparable in scale to that of the better-known west of England.

Drawing on far-reaching archival research, an extensive survey of surviving orchards and biodiversity surveys, the authors tell the fascinating story of orchards in the east since the late Middle Ages.

Orchards were ubiquitous features of the medieval and early modern landscape. Planted for the most part for practical reasons, they were also appreciated for their aesthetic qualities.

By the seventeenth century some districts had begun to specialise in fruit production - most notably west Hertfordshire and the Fens around Wisbech. But it was only in the ‘orchard century’, beginning in the 1850s, that commercial production really took off, fuelled by the growth of large urban markets and new transport systems that could take the fruit to them with relative ease.

  • More about the book

    By the 1960s orchards were extensive in many districts but, since then, they have largely disappeared, with significant impacts on landscape character and biodiversity.

    For well over a century now, orchards have been romanticised as nostalgic elements of a timeless yet disappearing rural world. Even before that, they were embedded in myths of lost Edens, or golden ages of effortless plenty.

    A key aim of this book is to challenge some of these myths by grounding orchards within a wider range of historical and environmental contexts.

    Orchards are not timeless, and in some ways our relationship with orchards is a classic example of the ‘invention of tradition’. What do our attitudes to this aspect of our heritage tell us about our wider engagement with the past, with nature, and with place?

  • Read a sample chapter

    Read an extract from The Orchards of Eastern England

  • About the Author/s:

    Tom Williamson

    Tom Williamson is Professor of Landscape History at the University of East Anglia. He has written widely on landscape archaeology, agricultural history, and the history of landscape design.

    He has extensive experience not only of archaeological and documentary research, but also of applying historical information in the conservation, restoration and interpretation of historic landscapes.

    Tom has worked on numerous occasions on legal cases, providing reports in rights of way and boundary disputes, and appearing in court as an expert witness.

    Other titles by this author

    • Hertfordshire: A landscape history – with Anne Rowe
    • The Origins of Hertfordshire
    • Rethinking Ancient Woodland - with Gerry Barnes
    • Trees in England - with Gerry Barnes and Toby Pillatt

    Gerry Barnes

    Gerry Barnes, MBE, served as Head of Environment at Norfolk County Council, and is now a researcher at the University of East Anglia, studying the history of trees and woodlands in eastern England.

    Other titles by this author

    • Rethinking Ancient Woodland - with Tom Williamson
    • Trees in England - with Tom Williamson and Toby Pillatt

ISBN: 978-1-912260-42-3 Format: Paperback, 270pp Published: Jul 2021

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Any questions

Contact us at UH Press if you have any queries or would like to find out more about this book.

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