Reviews > Book review

Designs Upon the Land by Oliver Creighton

The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2009; ISBN 9781843834465

To prove his sensational theory that, from the late Saxon period to the first Tudors, designed landscapes were already being laid out, chiefly around castles, Oliver Creighton had to illustrate his 250-page text lavishly. With 33 monochrome images, 34 persuasively clear plans and 12 dazzling aerial views in colour, he comes impressively close to making his point. This is an exhilarating but dangerous text, one only for wary critical readers. Caution is required as early on as the subtitle: ‘Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages’, with its suggestion that ‘elite’ historians may be needed to absorb this theme.

As a masterstroke of persuasion Creighton delivers his most convincing site, the grounds between Restormel Castle and its port town Lostwithiel on the Fowey in Cornwall, in his introductory chapter. Once convinced by his initial evidence, readers are likely to accept less persuasive examples more readily. Whereas most castles of the Middle Ages – Chester, Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Chepstow – sit on the very walled edge of their towns and naturally overlook the satisfying open landscapes of Dee, Severn, Teme and Wye on their rear elevations, Restormel is different. Its is sited high and lonely within a four-gated park pale with Lostwithiel, low and hard to defend, seeming to act as a central park feature far down to the south. Anyone approaching the castle from the town must wind up an impressive drive through a gate and past a hermitage-chapel below a Roman fort, with a fishery and a mill on the river adding landscape interest. The castle itself is built within a broad viewing terrace: a neat roundel with its own gatehouse, private chapel and apartments. The park hermit, Brother Philip, was being paid £2.13s.4d. a year in 1296, 300 years before Edmund Spenser made hermits into Romantic accessories in his Faerie Queene.

So, has the designed landscape been proven? Up to a point. The difficulty is that defensive sites tend naturally to be visually picturesque, and, ranging widely over Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Creighton can call in stimulating ‘designed landscapes’ from the wildest areas. Located on its rocky headland over the North Sea, Dunstanburgh was once ringed on its landward side by three meres that enforced an impressive approach from its harbour to its gate tower. But were the meres, now dry, ever more than defences, not attractive park features? There are seductive but slightly dubious captions to the illustrations that help to bolster Creighton’s thesis. A view through the gaping window hole of Launceston’s ‘High Tower’ is claimed to command ‘the medieval deer park’, but it views only hedged farmland with not a deer forest in sight. In county Fermanagh, Monea Castle’s tower- house is supposed to have been built to overlook a prehistoric crannog because that represented ‘the earlier Gaelic power centre in the locality’. But would Malcolm Hamilton, building his tower in 1610-18, have known what a ‘crannog’ was? Monorbier would, with its fishponds and church, have looked striking from the sea, but only because it had been constructed on a cliff to command a harbour, needed fish on Friday and a church on Sunday. Was that conscious elite design or just functional utility?

Linlithgow Palace rises splendidly on a headland above a lake with an attendant church. It almost clinches Creighton’s argument; but the complex garden earthworks next to Ashby-de-la-Zouche and Stirling castles are too late to make a medieval point. Was Clarendon Palace built where it lies simply to view the highest spire in England – Salisbury Cathedral – brilliantly focused down its valley? It is possible. This stimulating book deserves to be read not just for its theory, but for its wide geographical range of little known sites.

Dr Brian Earnshaw