Abstract

landscapes, Vol. 16 No. 1, June, 2015, 1–2 Graham Fairclough and Paul Stamper Oliver Rackham died on 12 February 2015. He was 75. Almost single-handedly he transformed how we look at woodland. The editors cannot be alone in reading Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976) when it came out (what happened to that excellent Dent series, Archaeology in the Field?) and seeing a whole new field opening up, not just in terms of woodland but historical ecology (and through it landscape ecology) more generally. His Trees and Woodland was revelatory and accessible, and all of a sudden words like coppicing and pollarding re-entered the landscape historian’s lexicon. Through books, papers and lectures he planted new understandings of past woodland management practices and ecology in both the academic and the public realms, along the way debunking long-cherished orthodoxies such as that which held the post-medieval iron industry had devastated British woods, and that the building of great ships for the Tudor Navy had destroyed the oak forests. He published many other books on woodland history, and it was to Oliver that the prestigious Collins ‘New Naturalist’ th series gave the distinction of providing the 100 volume, his Woodlands