Historic Landscape Character Areas

The creation of Historic Character Areas provides a method of consolidating historic characterisation data into a more generalised dataset based on geographically specific areas.

All historic characterisations (landscape, urban or seascape) form detailed, often complex, datasets which record the historic dimension of the present day. This complexity derives from the interrelation of several factors:

• The characterisation dataset is often formed of many thousands of individual parcels of land each associated with a large amount of data.
• The primary unit of these characterisations often called the Historic Landscape Character
Type is usually not geographically specific. They often occur across the full geographical range of any given landscape. This forms a complex spatial pattern of interrelated types.
• More recent characterisations record information on previous as well as present character

It is sometimes desirable to rework the datasets to provide a synthesis of the complex characterisation based on discrete geographical areas. This can be undertaken for three main reasons:

• To allow the broad assessment of the historic and archaeological dimensions of the landscape.
• To create areas that can be more easily engaged with and recognised by local people.
• To aid in the creation of Historic Environment Action Plans and other management tools.

You can download the methodology used by the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB to create Historic Landscape Character Areas,as well as a separate methodology on creating HLCA descriptions.

These are still in draft form and are aimed particular at other protected areas wishing to undertake similar work:

Creating Historic Landscape Character Areas (Draft) PDF (896 Kb)

Describing Historic Landscape Character Areas (Draft) PDF (260 Kb)