It is not an overstatement to say that it changed the way English people looked at the country they lived in. Before Hoskins, the English landscape was broadly taken for granted — beautiful, perhaps, or picturesque, or inconveniently in the way of a new road.

After Hoskins, it was a document. Every lane, every field boundary, the layout of every village and town, the route of canals and railways, the placement of fortifications and locations of industry, was evidence of human activity stretching back centuries, waiting to be read by anyone who knew how.

And Hoskins knew how.

The way he wrote about what he saw is as instructive for local historians today as the methodology itself.

The opening move: observation before interpretation

Hoskins had a habit, in his writing, of beginning with what could be seen rather than what could be inferred. He would describe a landscape — its contours, its settlement patterns, its field shapes — before offering any interpretation of what those features meant. The observation came first, and the argument grew out of it.

This is not merely a stylistic preference. It is a disciplined approach to evidence. By forcing himself to describe accurately before he theorised, Hoskins kept his interpretations honest. He couldn’t write his way around a feature that didn’t fit his argument, because he’d already described it.

For the local historian writing up their research, this is a lesson worth taking seriously. Describe what you actually found before you explain what it means. Let the evidence speak before you do.

This is a good habit for anyone who sees writing as a method of attempting to convey the truth (however limited our access to it). It’s a form of ‘show not tell.’

The long view

What makes Hoskins genuinely remarkable is the temporal depth of his vision. Where others saw a pleasant country lane, Hoskins saw a drove road used by Saxon farmers to move cattle between summer and winter pastures, following a line that had existed for a thousand years before anyone thought to surface it with tarmac. Where others saw an oddly shaped field, he saw the ridge and furrow of medieval strip farming, preserved under permanent pasture because the land was never ploughed up.

His writing conveys this long view not through academic apparatus — footnotes and hedged assertions — but through the accumulated confidence of a man who had spent decades in the landscape and in the archives. He writes as if the past is visible to him, not because he is claiming special powers, but because he has done the work that makes it visible.

In practice, this means that Hoskins rarely makes an assertion about a landscape feature without grounding it in documentary evidence. The long Saxon drove road is not just a romantic guess — it appears in charter evidence, in field name records, in the pattern of settlements along its length. The observation and the archive reinforce each other.

A word on his prose

Hoskins wrote beautifully, in a way that is unfashionable now but no less effective for that. His sentences are long but not slack. They accumulate detail in the way that a landscape accumulates history: layer upon layer, each addition building on what came before. He is fond of the telling specific: not “old farmhouses” but the exact farmhouse, in the exact parish, with its exact date carved above the door.

A short example, from The Making of the English Landscape, on the transformation wrought by industrialisation: he described the new industrial landscape not with horror or with celebration but with a precise, slightly mournful attention to what had been destroyed and what had been built in its place. The factories are described as accurately as the fields they replaced. Hoskins doesn’t editorialise excessively — the specificity does the work.

This is the technique worth borrowing. Specificity is a form of argument. The more precisely you describe what you found, the more persuasive your interpretation of it becomes.

What Hoskins teaches us about writing local history

Three things, primarily.

First: ground everything in observation. Before you explain, describe. Before you interpret, look.

Second: use the long view. A field, a street, a building has a history that extends far beyond the period you are researching. Acknowledging that depth, even briefly, makes your writing richer and more honest.

Third: trust the specific detail. The particular name, the exact date, the precise measurement — these are not pedantry. They are the substance of historical argument. A local historian who gives you the name of the family who farmed a field in 1750 is doing something that a general historian, writing about agricultural change in the abstract, cannot do. That specificity is your advantage. Use it.

Hoskins spent much of his career at the University of Leicester, and the tradition of English local history he established there — rigorous, archive-based, alert to landscape as evidence — still shapes the discipline today. He died in 1992, but The Making of the English Landscape remains in print. If you haven’t read it, read it. And if you have, read it again with a map open beside you.

You will never look at a field the same way.