This book is the first in a series of three companion volumes that sprung from a conference entitled W.G. Hoskins and the Making of the British Landscape held at the University of Leicester in 2005. It covers aspects of British landscape ‘history’ from the Mesolithic up to and including the Roman period. In their preface (and in Fleming's paper on prehistory as reflected in Hoskins’ work) Fleming and Hingley note the somewhat tenuous connections between Hoskins’ view of English landscape history and the archaeological development of our understanding of prehistoric and Roman landscapes in the 50 years since the publication of his signature work. Sensibly they recognise that the contributions to the present volume are better seen as a ‘stimulating, if necessarily selective survey of our field, demonstrating how far prehistoric and Romano-British landscape studies in Britain have moved since 1955’ (xvii). While the eleven papers cover several fascinating aspects of much of British prehistory, the papers on Iron Age and Roman subject matter (chs 7–11) are the focus of this review.

Hingley's paper (ch. 8) does a succinct job of summarising some of the major developments in approaches to the Roman period since Hoskins’ day and the significant ways in which these have changed our view of Britain's landscapes before the medieval period. In the concluding part of his account H. notes how the latter part of the twentieth century saw rationalist and specifically economic approaches to the Roman landscape challenged by re-emphasis on the symbolic and ritual significance of place. Interestingly, this diversity in approach is reflected in the other papers in this part of the book. While Driver, Rogers and Willis might be seen to take a more symbolic line, Schrufer-Kolb stresses a more determinedly economic approach in her analysis of iron production in the Roman landscape. There is little in S.-K.'s paper that might not be gleaned from some of her other more extended works on the subject and, though we gather useful insights into the chronology, technology and potential scale of iron production, there is still little sense of how such complex and often destructive or polluting technologies actually developed in their landscape (as opposed to regional) context.

Driver, by contrast tackles the difficult task of understanding an Iron Age landscape largely in the absence of excavated evidence by taking an innovative and valuable approach to re-interpreting the architectural logic and thus roles of hillforts in western Mid-Wales. In thinking of hillforts as complex architectural projects (rather than as classificatory objects in the way we have tended to), he identifies a number of interesting facets of their design that suggest a sophisticated understanding of the role of topography and monumental facade display in relation to movement through the wider agricultural landscape and socio-political relations between communities. In a somewhat similar vein, Rogers makes a forceful argument that we should better consider the ritual and symbolic richness of the Fenland landscape in Roman times. While his characterisation of previous work in the region as being solely reductionist and economic is an exaggeration, his summary of the extensive evidence for hoarding and (primarily) metalwork deposition in the region reminds us of the need to recognise the ‘otherness’ of past landscapes and especially wetland and coastal margins. Finally, Willis gives a typically thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the ways in which we have considered the urban landscapes of Roman Britain and their inter-relationship with the wider rural landscape. While not necessarily providing many answers to this challenge, the paper does identify some potential avenues for researching the interesting dialectic between urban landscapes and the everyday lives of those living in and around towns.

Together these contributions inevitably give a partial view of the landscapes of the period but, in doing so, they do provide a cross-section of the development of the subject in the early part of the twenty-first century that would have been unrecognisable to Hoskins.