Britain's landscape is the product of millions of years of geological evolution combined with thousands of years of human settlement and activity.  The ways in which people in the past and the present have and continue to shape our physical environment is not just a matter of academic interest it affects us all both in the way we identify with our surroundings and with our quality of life.  The aim of the Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) Project is to map and describe the present day landscape of Leicestershire and Rutland.  This will provide Leicestershire County Council's archaeological planning service with a detailed framework to aid our understanding of the landscape as a whole and provide us with an important tool that will contribute to the decision making process especially where issues affecting the landscape,both rural and urban are to be considered.

The Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland HLC Project is being carried out by the Historic and Natural Environment Team at Leicestershire County Council in partnership with English Heritage who provide funding and take the lead for the programme in England.  The project began in April 2006 and is due for completion in September 2008.  In Leicestershire the project area comprises seven districts and boroughs (Blaby, Charnwood, Harborough, Hinckley & Bosworth, Melton, North-West Leicestershire and Oadby & Wigston) which together with Rutland and the City of Leicester covers an area of c. 2,606 sq. km. and is home to almost 1,000,000 people.  Much of rural Leicestershire typically consists of gently rolling countryside which, together with relatively small rivers, tilled farmland and market towns, make for what on first impression would seem to be a county of fairly undramatic appearance.  However this impression masks the fact that Leicestershire and Rutland combine to produce a study area that contains a wide diversity of landscapes which have been shaped by topography, geology and land use history.  HLC will highlight both the diversity and and subtle nuances visible in the modern landscape and provide us with a means for setting it into a wider general context.

The project itself is a desk based exercise which uses a Geographical information System (GIS) combined with the Historic Environment Record (HER) database.  What this means is that the HLC Project Officer is able to view, overlay and combine numerous modern and historic maps with aerial photography and other sets of geographic data on the computer screen to create an HLC digital map layer that will provide continuous coverage of both Leicestershire and Rutland.  Essentially HLC is an attempt to systematically characterise, or describe, the historic dimension of the existing landscape.  HLC is concerned with mapping the landscape as a whole and has no chronological cut off date so that anything; no matter how recent is considered to be a component of the historic landscape character.  HLC is also an attempt to describe everything from the seemingly every day, modern urban developments or retail parks for example, to those landscapes more traditionally considered to be of special worth, such as formally laid out parks and gardens or field patterns that evolved through the piecemeal amalgamation of medieval strip fields.  Whilst the main objective of the project is to describe the landscape as is appears to us today where there is evidence for a different previous character this is also recorded.  The HLC process involves initially identifying and and drawing a boundary, or polygon,around an area on the map.  This area is then placed within one of twelve categories, Woodland or Settlement for example.  These categories are what are known as broad Character Types.

Once the Broad Character of the polygon has been attributed a more detailed HLC Type definition is assigned.  So, for example, within the Settlement Broad type a polygon may be further identified as being Historic Settlement Core or Modern Residential.  Similarly if a polygon is given a Fields and Enclosed Land Broad Character Type it could then be assigned an HLC Type of Planned or Piecemeal Enclosure.  Within the Leicestershire and Rutland HLC there are around 120 different HLC Types.

Historic and modern maps along with aerial photographs are examined to help produce the HLC map

The project is currently nearing the completion of the mapping stage with Characterisation for Blaby, Charnwood, Hinckley & Bosworth Melton and North-West Leicestershire completed, Harborough over two thirds of the way through and smaller pockets of Oadby & Wigston, Rutland and Leicester having also been done.

Although principally a planning tool it is recognised that HLC also has significant potential as a resource which could be made more widely available to the general public.  It is an aspiration of the Historic and Natural Environment Team that HLC data should become readily available as an initial building block for individuals or groups wishing to carry out more in depth and focused research within the county.  Similarly the data from HLC could at some point be adopted as an educational or outreach tool and might, for example, provide children with a context for how their local area sits within the wider historic landscape.

Once the project has been completed and the data analysed results should start to become available on the Leicestershire County Council website but anyone wishing to find out more about landscape characterisation in general can do so by visiting the English Heritage website www.english-heritage.org.uk/ and following the links through Research & Conservation to Archaeology & Buildings to the page Promoting Characterisation.