Every part of the landscape has history. Rather than focus on archaeological sites such as Deserted Medieval Villages or Iron Age Hillforts, this project studies the whole landscape so that the very modern is recorded as well as the very old.

The project has split the 380 square miles of the AONB landscape into 4,438 separate areas. Each individual area has a unique landscape morphology and land use history. Using this information, each area is assigned information about its Historic Landscape Type.

Mapping and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) plays a central role in both the creation of the HLC dataset and in the presentation of the results.

Please see the Methodology pages to get a full understanding of how the maps are constructed.

Just under half of the landscape also retains fossilised traces of previous land uses and information is also recorded on these.