Identifying special Derbyshire landscapes
Squeezer stile in a boundary wall at Crich
SARAH WHITELEY describes a new holistic approach to recording historic landscape character in Derbyshire
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erbyshire County Council Cultural Heritage team recently undertook a pilot project which used Derbyshire Historic Environment Record (DHER), Historic Landscape Character (HLC) and Derbyshire Landscape Strategy data, to identify areas with key cultural heritage characteristics. Derbyshire has already been the subject of two indepth studies of the development of the character of its landscape. The Derbyshire Historic Landscape Character Assessment (DHLCA) was conducted in the late 1990s by a team hosted by the Peak District National Park Authority. The aim of this project was to digitally map the historic landscape character of the large area of the county which was not part of the National Park, complementing a similar study which had been completed for the area of the National Park. Analysis and interpretation drew on the substantial resource of early maps and surveys of the county, collated from a range of archives, the earliest dating from the mid-16th century.
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ACID | 2022
This project was succeeded by Derbyshire Historic Landscape Characterisation (DHLC) project, conducted between 2009 and 2013 by the then Historic Environment Record Officer, Nicola Manning. The methodology for this project was based on the English Heritage template for delivering HLC projects and used 1st edition 25 in. OS and modern OS mapping. In 2003 Derbyshire County Council published Landscape Character of Derbyshire, building on the work done nationally by the Countryside Agency (now Natural England) in their landscape characterisation programme. The Derbyshire study identified 39 Landscape Character Types (LCT) across 10 National Character Areas (NCA) to help describe the diversity and character of the county’s landscapes. The recent pilot project aimed to review and analyse the diversity of HLC types within the spatial framework of Landscape Character Areas identified in Landscape Character of Derbyshire. DHER information was also assessed in order to try to identify areas which retained a high level of both historic environment and landscape value. The pilot project timescale was relatively short and meant that it was only possible to study one Landscape Character Area: C.A. 50: Derbyshire Peak Fringe and Lower Derwent; which is made up of six Landscape
