Together with the documentary record the landscape is our other major source for the past around us and there are various guides to teach us how to read it, not least the work of W.G.Hoskins. This section is only a brief introduction to give some guidance and mentions some of the documents of greatest use in interpreting the landscape.

Settlement patterns: the present-day layout of a settlement can frequently yield clues to its past history. The wide main street of towns such as Honiton may reveal the presence of a market in past centuries, the street being wide enough to accommodate stalls or even more permanent buildings, such as a butchers' shambles. Small village like Lydford preserve the evidence of Saxon town planning with grassy paths between houses along the main street representing planned side streets which were never developed in an important town which once had its own mint but was later abandoned. Abandoned settlements, such as that on Hound Tor, may be recognised by the visible remains but others may have to be deduced from crop marks or the presence of trackways. Surviving buildings also provide much evidence, indicating the wealth of the occupants (many Devon churches were rebuilt in the fifteenth century, a prosperous period for the wool trade), or the growth of the town (housing developments attached to industrial undertakings in the 18th or 19th centuries can be difficult to pinpoint from historical sources but they provide in themselves very concrete evidence of the past. Examples are not just to be found in towns such as Tiverton but also in villages where papermakers or other millowners have built cottages for the millworkers. Access to local and national guides to architecture - public, industrial and vernacular - is important to be able to date and identify particular types of buildings. Section 4.2 gives more guidance on this.

Field patterns: the Braunton Great Field is a nationally known example of the open field system but vestiges of strip systems can on occasion be detected on maps, through aerial photographs or on the ground. Other special types of field systems are the burgage plots of South Zeal, a fossilised relic of a new town planned in the middle ages, and the Dartmoor reaves, identified as land boundaries dating back to the bronze age. In places the embankments surrounding medieval deer parks or other estates can be seen crossing woodland or surviving as hedgebanks. The techniques of hedgerow dating, based on counting the number of species of tree or shrub making up a hedge, can often be used to test whether such a boundary is ancient.

Roads and tracks: while ley lines should be treated with the greatest of caution, normally being the result of using a ruler and compasses on a map rather than fieldwork, there are fossilised road networks that can be deduced from the ground. Sometimes a modern road will diverge from the original route to divert around a steep obstacle, the original line being marked by a green lane. Care should be taken to distinguish apparent trackways from mill leats, deserted railways, or even roads and runways connected with World War 2 installations. Here early editions of Ordnance Survey maps and even the tithe survey can be helpful.

There are a number of types of records that are especially useful in conjunction with fieldwork. Maps have already been mentioned and a related source is aerial photographs. There are collections of these in most libraries, but coverage is normally limited as they are expensive to acquire. Libraries have acquired two complete fly-overs of Devon, one made in 1981 and the other in 1993, but the detail on these is normally only sufficient to identify field and settlement patterns rather than the detailed crop-marks which may be produced during extreme weather conditions.

Land charters and other early perambulations of boundaries often give details that can be checked out by fieldwork. The charters are largely pre-conquest grants of land, commonly by the monarch. They frequently give details of boundaries and boundary marks which are still very descriptive of natural and man-made lements in the landscape. A listing is given by H.P.R.Finberg in The early charters of Devon and Cornwall (2nd ed, 1963). They were worked on by W.G.Hoskins in The westward expansion of Wessex (1960) and more recently by Della Hooke in Pre-conquest charter-bounds of Devon and Cornwall (1994). For a more recent period glebe terriers sometimes include a perambulation of the parish boundaries described topographically with reference to adjoining estates.

Place-name studies can also complement fieldwork for this early period and still the most comprehensive source here is The place-names of Devon, published by the English Place-Name Society in 1931.

Many of the results of fieldwork and excavation are published in the transactions of national and local archaeological soiceties, such as the Devon Archaeological Society. Reference to more than 55,000 recorded items of archaeological and historic interest linked to an Ordnance Survey map base is maintained by the Devon Sites and Monuments Register at County Hall. This is open to the public during normal office hours by prior appointment only (tel: 01392-382266).