Traces of Conflict: Environment and Eviction in British Military Training Areas, 1943 to Present

Abstract

This study presents military training areas as important military landscapes, and sites of conflict in their own right. It explores the development of military-environmentalism at two active British training areas, Salisbury Plain Training Area and Lulworth Range, Dorset. It contrasts the rise of the military-environmental discourse with the removal of human inhabitants of the areas during the Second World War. The public protests and memorial attempts that followed, it argues, along with (but not allied with) emerging environmentalism, shaped military understanding of the value of its landholdings. Two walks at Salisbury Plain Training Area and Imber highlight the critical role of access in militarized landscapes. This study goes beyond the barbed wire to reveal military training areas as complex places, at which a site-based perspective teases out the nuances of broad narratives—war, rural development, environmentalism, and anti-military protest—as they have played out on two different landscapes from 1943 to the present.