The Rockingham Forest Project created detailed digital mapping, from archaeological fieldwork, historic map, and aerial photographic evidence, to chart the evolution over the last millennium of the landscape of the greater part of the medieval Forest of Rockingham, Northamptonshire. It has revealed a landscape where the physical geography, especially the geology acting via the soils, was the primary determinant of land use, but where the administrative units, particularly the townships, controlled how land-use change was structured. The townships were typically self-contained units combining a balance of resources, with adjacent townships often following quite different trajectories, sometimes for hundreds of years.This landscape appears to have been extensively replanned in the late Anglo-Saxon and early medieval periods; saw continuing settlement expansion and sometimes extensive woodland clearance until the early fourteenth century; then in the late medieval and post-medieval periods experienced a growing rate of reorganisation through enclosure, reaching its height during Parliamentary enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout this period woodland was in decline, though at greatly varying rates, until by the twentieth century it had been totally destroyed as a distinctive landscape zone. The process has been one of the progressive decoupling of land use from physical geography, most intensively during the last 150 years with processes such as rapid urbanisation and mineral extraction, creating a wholly new landscape.