39 chapter four he Estate: Recognising People and Place in the Modern Landscape Jonathan Finch he landscape that has developed since the sixteenth century is often assumed to be too familiar, too well documented, and too well trodden to require abstract theorisation and serious investigation by landscape historians and archaeologists. he latter are particularly prone to characterise the modern landscape as a sheer veil, through which the contours and shadows of ancient landscapes can be traced. It is the understanding and reconstruction of those ancient landscapes that has been the focus of the most innovative approaches to landscape theory and interpretation over the last decade. Prehistorians have articulated cognitive geographies of the past by exploring the dynamic relation- ships between monuments, settlements and land use (Bradley 1998; Edmonds 1999; Ingold 2000; Tilley 1994). Drawing on anthropological models of the complex relationships between landscapes and the processes of inhabitation, they have sought to people the prehistoric landscape. One of their key aims has been to connect and contrast individual, subjective and leeting lives with the long-term processes that structured the material conditions with which those people engaged, in order to reconstruct the experience of past landscapes (Barrett 1994, 1–3; Gosden 1999, 154). Such approaches have, however, failed to make a signiicant impact upon our interpretation and understanding of the historic or modern landscape for two reasons. Firstly, there is the assumption, mentioned above, that the social institutions and economic climate, and even perhaps the mentalities that shaped the landscape, are familiar and understandable: they are part of what deines ‘modernity’ and, as such, they are perceived as lacking the ‘oth- erness’ that demands critical and imaginative engagement with the material remains. Secondly, there is a strong tradition of empiricism within histori- cal landscape studies that aims to ‘read the landscape’, reinforcing a dualism between physical and cultural landscapes by emphasising the former over the latter rather than recognising their indivisibility. Features of the modern land- scape are therefore (easily) recognised and classiied: once they are ‘read’ and understood the interpretive process comes to a halt. As a result, the modern Hoskins 3 Post Medieval Landscap39 39 05/11/2007 15:25:55