Historic landscape surveys are planned for all National Trust properties. Through field visits, study of national and local archives, as well as aerial photographs, we can build up a picture of a site's archaeological significance.

Invisible history

Some important sites only survive below ground where they have been buried by natural processes. Many such sites are identifiable from aerial photography, and may contain important structural or organic remains, or artefactual evidence.

During survey, the condition and form of all noted features are recorded and recommendations made for their careful management. Surveys also record the 'ordinary' details of landscape, which might otherwise be taken for granted, and inadvertently lost or disregarded. Survey and research into field banks and walls, for example, at West Penwith, Cornwall, and in the Lake District, have shown that existing fields reflect the shapes of much earlier ones, and the field walls themselves are the 'fossilised' survivals of medieval, sometimes prehistoric enclosures. Features like these could be easily passed over as unimportant and mundane, but they are significant for their local distinctiveness, giving identity and character to a particular locality, and to the people who belong to it. In this way, the National Trust values the richness of everyday elements of the landscape as significant parts of the whole, giving local colour and context to the wider picture.

The historic importance of woodlands, wood pasture and parks is also recorded. Sometimes the woodland cover masks earlier earthwork remains. On the Holnicote Estate, Exmoor, a recent survey within the ancient Horner Wood has revealed the existence of a small medieval settlement, with a number of rectangular building platforms, hollow-ways (sunken ancient tracks), and what appears to be a prehistoric enclosure above, on the moorland edge.