ABSTRACT
THE journeys described in this book began in libraries and ended in the open air. The traveller, armed with maps, was sometimes
seeking what a document suggested he might find, and sometimes coming back to books and documents in order to explain or confirm what he noticed in the landscape. One fellow-traveller in the history of landscapes has publicly declared that by exploring the English countryside on foot he makes at least one major historical discovery a week. The journeys described in these pages cannot claim to have extended the frontiers of knowledge at this revolutionary rate, but every English historian with an interest in fieldwork is dealing with an inexhaustible source of evidence, more than enough for one man's lifetime.
