This book deals with the region which later comprised the counties of Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, in the fifth to eleventh centuries. Its thesis is that a major reorganisation of settlement, which occurred during that period, was intrinsically connected with the arrival and consolidation of Christianity in the same period. The approach is explained in the introduction: ‘In the absence of comprehensive written records or plentiful archaeological evidence, it is likely that an analysis of the relationships between ecclesiastical centres and certain other elements of the landscape may allow interpretations about the status and role of the church in contemporary society' (p. 13). Archaeological interpretation of the landscape is achieved by means of ‘Historic Landscape Characterisation’, a method whereby regions are classified into zones of different types of land-use at earlier periods (farmland, moorland, woodland). Turner identifies the probable locations of ‘likely major early medieval ecclesiastical communities' (p. 38) in the five counties, contrasting Cornwall with its more Saxon neighbours. He then examines the ways in which these locations may have related to contemporary secular settlements (reflecting the administrative and secular roles of the churches), and also to contemporary administrative structures, if we may guess at the possible parishes of early Saxon minster-churches by using later hundredal boundaries. From the major sites Turner progresses to the ‘ritual landscape’ at a more local level (cemeteries, inscriptions, holy wells) and its relation to the ‘new administrative geographies' (p. 143). During Turner's period chapels and minor churches arose in between the major ecclesiastical sites; rather than considering this infilling in terms of spiritual needs Turner sees it as reflecting both the administrative requirements of large early foundations such as Glastonbury, and also the desires of secular landowners for estate-churches under their own control. Finally he considers the ways in which the new administrative centres were specifically Christian, in the sense that a fledgling town might be modelled upon Rome as an ideal, even if the reality was a very different kind of place, the similarity lying in the attempt to create an ‘important focus for spiritual, political and economic life' (p. 186), contrasting both with the farmland and also with the marginal land (woodlands and moorlands), seen ideologically as a ‘perilous zone’ (p. 188).

Christian belief and practice play little part in the book. The emphasis is on churches as ‘central places … of ideological self-understanding, but also in the landscapes of production, consumption, settlement and belief' (p. 13). The worship which must have occurred in these ‘central places' is not discussed, apart from the suggestion that ‘members of the community could congregate for meetings at certain times’ (p. 97). Thus the question, whether the restructuring of the landscape was intrinsically due to the arrival of Christianity, or whether the two changes merely coincided, remains largely unconsidered. Much of the area also experienced a change of language, from Celtic to Germanic: it is valuable to study the subject across this cultural divide, although it is not clear how much difference the divide made, especially in Devon, which underwent a complete change from one culture to the other during Turner's period. Native Britons might have inherited some institutionalised Christianity from their Roman past, but such continuity is here considered exceptional (p. 185).