This excellent and stimulating set of papers originates in a conference on post-medieval estate landscapes held by the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology in April 2003. Twelve papers look at different aspects of estate landscapes, ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and from Britain and Ireland to the Caribbean. After a brief preface and an introductory paper by Tom Williamson, the papers are divided into three groups.

In the first group, ‘Landscapes and Improvement’, Jonathan Finch examines the Castle Howard estate and shows how the ‘ornamental’ and ‘productive’ elements of the landscape should be considered together. Robert Silvester and Judith Alfrey examine the development of Vaynor in the Severn Valley. Sam Turner's paper looks at a rather lower social group. In what for me was the most interesting and original of the papers, Turner examines a ‘difficult’ and complex Devon landscape, largely enclosed by c. 1400, and picks out from it subtle elements of agricultural improvement, in particular the development of regularised, rectangular fields around ‘barton’ farms. He is thus able to push a socially middling ethic of ‘improvement’ back into the later Middle Ages.

The second section, ‘Landscapes and Material Culture’, looks at particular elements of estate landscapes. Charles Orser shows how buildings and other elements of Tanzyfort House, County Sligo, were deployed to express the self-image of the owners. David Dawson and Oliver Kent discuss the siting and products of an eighteenth-century kiln on an estate at Dunster, Somerset. Paul Everson insists on the need to look at the meanings of landscapes, while Harold Mytum looks at the role of monuments in constructing memory, for example in respect of members of estate households who died in the two World Wars. Barbara Heath's paper delineates the meanings of Thomas Jefferson's ‘landscape of retirement’ in Virginia. This is a model study of a very short-lived landscape (am I the only one to suspect an allusion to Avebury in the circular form of the garden, with trees planted in a circle inside a deep ditch, as depicted conjecturally on p.142?).

‘Colonial Landscapes’ range from Ireland to the Caribbean. Colin Breen looks at the settlements of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English planters and links this with nascent capitalism. Roger Leech and Dan Hicks discuss colonial landscapes on Nevis and St Kitts, and on the British Leeward Islands, respectively.

If I have one criticism of the volume, it is that although the majority of papers make bold and exciting archaeological inferences about their material, this boldness is not articulated in the volume as a whole. The preface is short, just over two pages, and there is no concluding discussion. As a result, the collective view taken on the role of archaeology in understanding estate landscapes is slightly less than the sum of the individual papers. Williamson, in his introductory paper on archaeological research agenda, defines a ‘landed estate’ in the British context as ‘an extensive or near-continuous area of land, owned as absolute private property by an individual, although not necessarily (following the elaboration of the institution of the strict settlement in the later seventeenth century) his or hers to alienate at will’ (p. 1). Hicks by contrast takes a broad and comparative approach to understanding estate landscapes, and discusses ‘some of the ways the archaeology of colonialism can [decentre] our conceptions of Britishness’ (p. 205). The papers by Williamson and Hicks are both excellent, but like chalk and cheese in their approach. I would have loved to hear a conversation between them, or a concluding Discussion drawing out contrasts and comparisons.

With one or two of the papers, the concluding discussion could have done a little more to highlight the insights established through hard scholarship. Dawson and Kent indicate that their kiln structure was deliberately retained as an element in subsequent views over the park. I wanted to hear more about this: are there other examples of industrial elements in ‘prospects’, as opposed to Gothick ruins and follies? Is there any evidence of how the kiln was seen, as a romantic ruin or as an emblem of industry? Again, Everson carefully discusses the necessity of exploring the meanings in designed landscapes, but ‘meanings’ are defined quite narrowly. I wanted to hear more about the meanings that might have been ascribed to elements of the landscape by the illiterate, the poor, by different genders and so on.

Estate Landscapes is a fine volume, one of the best and most enjoyable sets of papers I have read for some time. The generation of scholars represented here have the potential to go on from these fine individual studies to a genuinely comparative and processual view not just of estate landscapes but of landscapes across the Atlantic world, stretching from rectangular Devon fields to Caribbean and Virginian plantations. This volume is in many ways a set of studies advancing towards that very exciting prospect. We should remain impatient and ambitious for arrival at the final destination.