Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 278

Most of the historic landscape surveys commissioned by English Heritage, its Scottish and Welsh counterparts, or by private landowners remain as typescript reports with limited circulation. They are working documents intended, firstly, to record the surviving historic features and, secondly, to provide agreed methods of management to ensure the preservation of the archaeological remains. The Chatsworth survey has broken free from the confines of this type of document, and the series of commissioned studies of the landscape archaeology of the estate around the great house have been re-cast as a book for a wider audience. In fact, it is the second such book; the earlier one examined the features of the park and gardens. These books are aimed at the reader who might want to investigate in detail the local landscape and understand how it reached its present form.

The area of the survey was defined by the current Chatsworth estate, but it is a broad swathe of Derbyshire landscape, measuring some 35 square kilometres, and provides a cross-section of the Peak District. It takes in the better land of the Derwent valley and the upland heather moors to the east. The ephemeral prehistoric remains have survived in the uplands alone: elsewhere they have been removed by subsequent agriculture. The Bronze Age fields on the moors are often poorly defined, sometimes marked only by cleared stone in otherwise stony ground. These uplands reverted to open moorland in the late Iron Age and Roman periods because of the deteriorating climate. Evidence for contemporary agriculture in the Derwent valley is slight, as it has been erased by later activity. A clearer picture only emerges again in the late medieval period. The ridge and furrow of the open fields has been preserved within the later parkland around Chatsworth, where there is particularly fine survival of the landscape. In each township there was a village or hamlet, usually of irregular form, set in the middle of its open fields. In areas of the poorer soil there were holdings in severalty, sometimes associated with isolated farmsteads. Harewood Grange is one of these, and is defined by a boundary earthwork on one side and moorland on the others. Medieval charters indicate that it had rights of grazing on the adjoining wastes on Harland Edge. A surviving medieval cross base on Beeley Warren might mark the boundary of the monks’ holding.

The present-day landscape is largely the result of the work undertaken since William Cavendish purchased the Old Hall at Chatsworth and the associated land in 1549. The estate was progressively extended during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the largest addition was made through an exchange of land with the Duke of Rutland in 1823–5. It is not possible to make a sharp distinction between the parkland around the house and the surrounding farmland. The entire landscape around an eighteenth-century great house was modelled to provide gardens and vistas stretching far beyond, and in the nineteenth century, aristocratic influence extended to the creation of estate landscapes proclaiming wider ownership. At Chatsworth this is seen in the extension of the gardens and the diversion of the coach road in the early eighteenth century. In the 1760s the park was remodelled by Capability Brown and again from 1826 onwards under Joseph Paxton. The buildings of the village of Edensor at the gates of the park were reconstructed or altered in the 1830s and 1840s to create a model estate village.

This sequence of landscape development is repeated around numerous great houses across England. Chatsworth is by no means unique. The strength and the limitation of this volume is that it is a detailed study of one place. It does not seek to set the history of the estate landscape into a wider context and is essentially descriptive rather than analytical. It is clearly aimed at the visitor to Chatsworth and has an excellent chapter describing and illustrating the historic features to be seen along a series of walks through the park and estate. Agricultural historians may quarry this volume for examples of features found elsewhere, but the limited use of the estate archives and the emphasis on the visible landscape suggest that it has not been written with that audience in mind.