Founders: Oliver Rackham

Abstract

In 1986 Oliver Rackham published The History of the Countryside. For many of us – those who had not had the privilege of being taught by him – his confident stride out of the woods into the wider countryside beyond was a surprise, but the 445-page book was unmistakably his from the moment you opened it and saw his distinctive hand-drawn figures with their black-lettered labels. And wherever your eye fell on the page you were drawn in to read on, by the detailed yet vivacious prose, by the firmly expressed opinions, and perhaps most of all by the tumble of things you never knew about the countryside: nature, man and landscape in combination. The book was an enormous success, attracting praise from a wide range of reviewers. It was a surprise best-seller (reprinted twice in 1986) and winner in the same year of the Angel Literary Award. Soon it appeared in paperback and has rarely if ever been out of print since. For Richard Mabey it was ‘a classic of scholarship and imagination...a monumental work...written with humanity, dignity, concern and a great deal of humour’. What is so noticeable, looking through the reviews 30 years on, is how many of the writers rehearsed long strings of individual sentences or phrases which had caught their eye, whether new-found truisms, or deliberate provocations: ‘A moment’s thought will show that the average English country churchyard will contain at least 10,000 bodies’; ‘Archaeologists record landscapes, Vol. 16 No. 2, November, 2015, 182–192