Orchards in England, a landscape history: A fruitful wander through the agriculture of the past

Orchards have not featured largely in studies of the historic environment, though there is a growing recognition of their ecological value. Yet orchards were once ubiquitous features of the landscape in many counties, whether in the form of a small plot attached to a farm, or as a large commercial orchard cultivated as the owner’s principal source of income. Making up for this omission is a new book by Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson that attempts, for the first time, to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of orchards in England from the Middle Ages to the present day, as Chris Catling reports.

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Current Archaeology

July 30, 2024

W G Hoskins, in The Making of the English Landscape (1954), has but a single mention of orchards, in his angry final chapter on the landscape today, in which he deplores, among other acts of vandalism, the destruction of ‘apple trees that are the successors of those that grew here in the time of Charles I’. Oliver Rackham refused to include orchards in The History of the Countryside (1986) because he considered them to belong to the realm of the garden and other forms of formal planting, not to the natural world (an odd omission, since the central theme of that book is that nothing in the countryside is natural – from woodland, to hedges, to fields, watercourses, and ponds, all represe

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