Abstract

LANDSCAPES 171 themselves – a point which resonates as I write these words in a Herefordshire awash with floodwater. Anglo-Saxon routes were punctuated by posts, stones or ancient trees, verticals which sometimes bore names evoking well-known supernatural figures: boundary marks for estates, but more importantly waymarks for travellers. Some ‘stone posts’ were probably Roman milestones. In some areas we are treated to fascinating glimpses of landscape character – like the fragment of Hampshire (p. 80) which represents a ‘managed’ landscape of transhu- mance, with hedges, gates, dew-ponds, and a Butermere placename; elsewhere there are ‘ship gates’ and ‘turn gates’ controlling access to watering holes (p. 82). Shades of East Yorkshire in later prehistory. Well-spaced ‘gates’ once ran along a line through what is now Savernake Forest, linking the east end of the Wansdyke with the Bedwyn Dykes along the Wessex- Mercia frontier. Both cases afford us a tantalising glimpse of the past deployment of ‘long hedges’ for purposes transcending the local enclosure of ‘fields’. A historical narrative emerges, reminiscent of that which has developed for early medieval settlement and land enclosure, with the ‘age of emporia’ morphing into the ‘age of infrastruc- ture’. An important idea is that ‘herepaths