The lie of the land has long been used the world over to place statements. Whether they resulted from piety or pride (communal or personal), most of these statements were probably designed as monuments. Some were later modified and some – deliberately or through neglect – degraded. Some sites, to the contrary, only became monuments at the hands of later generations. Elsewhere, monumentality was achieved less by building than by ‘landscaping’ a site’s surroundings; but, in some cases, changes to surroundings have spoiled the effect of a site so that only by studying it closely can we recognize now that once it was a monument.
Britain’s landscapes are full of monuments, surviving or lost. The earliest discovered monument, long lost from sight on the ground, is more than 6000 years old. There followed great earthen enclosures and then settings such as Stonehenge, Woodhenge and Orkney’s circles. Skyline burial mounds proliferated 4000 years ago. So it was onto a scene, already repeatedly changed, that the Romans added their pointed statements of dignity and power. If the principal monuments of the Middle Ages were churches and their towers, the Modern era’s are grand houses and gardens, civic halls, factories, railway stations and now skyscrapers, too.
Much of the evidence is ambiguous. It is sometimes difficult to understand the former lie of the ground. More fundamentally, it is often difficult to work out the builders’ intentions. We usually depend, in those cases, on assessing evidence in perspectives much wider than the monuments’ local settings.
