Characterized by large swathes of unimproved heaths, commons and arable open elds, it has long been noted that the ‘sheep-corn’ regions of west Norfolk became a target for agrarian improvers in the eighteenth century. Denouncing the district as a ‘capital disgrace to the country’, contemporary writers criticized the environmental and social depravation of villages in the area.2 In 1769 William Gilpin, purveyor of the picturesque movement, described Breckland as ‘a piece of absolute desert almost in the heart of England’. e open heaths were deemed to be unproductive wastes, the unenclosed elds ‘ragged and dirty’, the people ‘dreary and desolate’.3 Late eighteenth-century ambitions to bring about the improvement of land and people found expression in the physical reorganization and aesthetic enclosure of the land.4 New boundaries of quickset hedges, linear

roads and regular plantations were laid out, and existing boundaries and roads straightened. us the drawing-board landscape of Oliver Rackham’s ‘planned countryside’ was created.5