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Book Review
| The Moorlands of England and Wales: An Environmental History 8000 BC to AD 2000. By Ian G. Simmons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.; distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press (New York), 2004. ix + 414 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, select bibliography, glossary, index. Cloth $75.00, paper $27.00.
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| Moorlands are a habitat largely restricted to the British Isles. They are uplands but not true mountains, botanically analogous to the lowland heaths of Germany, Denmark, Holland, and southern England (which are under still greater pressure), but high, wet, and cold. They are a landscape of broad open spaces, dominated by heather (Calluna) or coarse grasses (Molinia and nardus), sometimes now by dark plantations of Sitka spruce. Since the Romantics at least they have been contested territory—should they be for use, or delight; for production, or pleasure; are they a waste, demanding reclamation and investment, or, as the historian G. M. Trevelyan put it in 1938, "regions where young and old can enjoy the sight of unspoiled nature." |
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