ABSTRACT
The study of the historic landscape has a diverse and rich heritage within a number of cognate disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Attempts to define the historic landscape have, mercifully, proved difficult, preserving its multi- and inter-disciplinary appeal. Understanding the significance of the historic landscape is recognised in most European nations since the ratification of the European Landscape Convention in 2004. Drawing on phenomenology and anthropological studies of relationships between cultures, communities and landscapes, post-processualists emphasised that individuals can exist within a reciprocal relationship with their surroundings, rather than being abstracted and separated from it in a Cartesian sense. Ingold has argued that landscape studies need to recognise the 'dwelling perspective': emphasising that people were reciprocally engaged with the landscape within which they lived. Historic landscape studies also suffer, arguably, from the apparent familiarity of its material.
