Author John Hunter has bridged the gap in explaining the quirks of the Essex countryside, writes TOM KING

Some 43 years ago the great W G Hoskins, half historian, half geographer, and entirely his own man, wrote one of the greatest pioneering works in British historical literature, The Making of the English Landscape.

Hoskins contrived to show how the familiar English landscape of today was the result of thousands of years of human activity.

He explained a host of quirks in the landscape -- just why there was a kink in a village street, or why ancient market-places were wedge-shaped rather than rectangular.

With Hoskins in hand, the landscape suddenly became something that you could read like a book and fascinating stories about human achievement, greed, ruthlessness, heroism and sheer oddity it told, to be sure.

Hoskins attracted more devotees and acolytes than any Indian guru and a whole heavy brigade of other authors and PhD students thundered across the landscape in question, pursuing his methods.

A magnificent series of county books followed in the wake of the original, with local authors doing a Hoskins on their own territory.

Our direct neighbours, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire have all been covered. There has remained, however, one glaring great hole in my bookshelf, marked E, and I'm not talking about the Making of the Egyptian Landscape.

Now, at last, the hole has been plugged by the learned architect and planner John Hunter. Essex has been Hoskined by Hunter, and the history of the county's hedgerows and village streets set down in a fine-looking new volume published by the Essex Record office.

It may be almost half a century late, but there are compensations. John Hunter writes in his introduction: "Essex missed out (on the original series) and probably just as well for it would have been somewhat thin. Since then, a wealth of information, unimaginable in 1970, has come from the work of archaeologists."

You don't need to read very far into this book to see what he means. The past few years alone have seen some astonishing revelations.

Take the south Essex area alone. Who, when Hoskins' book first came out, would have realised that Wickford was a fortified Roman town, or that Mucking would prove "the most extensive early Anglo-Saxon site excavated in England"?

Perhaps the most striking conclusion is that we still, essentially, live in a medieval landscape, at least where Essex "has not been overwhelmed by urban and industrial development."

Even then, a modern housing estate can often provide the key to an ancient landscape. For instance, the triangle of development between Hadleigh High Street, New Road and Rectory Road exactly marks the exact parameters of the medieval Hadleigh common.

John Hunter makes it all sound so easy. Why does that tall farmhouse on Galleywood Common have that huge upper storey window? Easy - so that ladies of the manor could watch their menfolk hunting deer. Next!

Why does Hadleigh Castle only have walls on three sides? Answer: it wasn't really built for defensive purposes but for show, and a fourth stone wall would have spoilt the view.

The Essex landscape is a carefully researched book which, as far as I can see, leaves nothing out. Alas, it omits one quality that was implicit in Hoskins' work -a sense of magic.

John Hunter's survey is seldom animated by any human touches, and the litany of facts becomes somewhat dusty, the last word to apply to Essex.

Yet even the scholar-sleuth John Hunter admits, occasionally, to being stymied. The mysteries of the Essex landscape that stump the learned landscape historian are among the most intriguing aspects of this book.

What can explain, for instance, the presence of the magnificent and expensively-built Norman church at Corringham, isolated in the godforsaken, disease-ridden wilderness of the Thames marshes?

If there are any readers who can remember back 900 years, the author would love to know.

What awful thing was happening in the mid-14th century that accounts for such a concentration of moated sites? In south Essex they stretch from Southchurch Hall to the old Basildon village site on Holy Cross hill.

What were Essex people trying to keep out? All the author can say is "this rich and fascinating field invites study." So on with the wading boots all you amateur historians.

The Essex landscape is a carefully researched book which, as far as I can see, leaves nothing out. Alas, it omits one quality that was implicit in Hoskins' work -a sense of magic.

John Hunter's survey is seldom animated by any human touches, and the litany of facts becomes somewhat dusty, the last word to apply to Essex.

Sometimes, though, Mr Hunter gives away perhaps more about human nature than he realises. For instance, he draws attention to the line of Second World War concrete pillboxes that stretches along the Chelmsford turnpike, through Battlesbridge, to Canvey - a familiar feature of the landscape all along the A130.

These pillboxes look as if they were thrown down at random. In fact, they are part of a grand design. They formed the General Headquarters Defensive line, constructed to protect London (and come to that, the Wickford Co-op) from invasion via the east.

After the war, farmers complained bitterly about the obstruction to their machinery caused by the pillboxes. They were provided with grants to demolish these obstructions. Somehow, though, the money wafted away elsewhere.

Perhaps a few farmers' wives acquired new hats, and a layer of landscape history was, quite inadvertently left intact.

Now, preserved by accident, the filthy old pillboxes have become national monuments, as well as stories, written in the ground.

By such quirks has the Essex landscape always been formed.

Wickford - in the mid '60s, when Hoskins was researching his book, evidence of the town being a fortified Roman settlement had not been uncovered

(Right) Natural charm - Mucking Creek has changed little through the centuries

Landscape - the cover to John Hunter's book The Essex Landscape

(Below right) Hadleigh Castle was built for show, not defensive purposes

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.