Battlescapes: The Impact of Terrain on War and Military Strategy

"This is a lavishly illustrated and readable book of some sixteen chapters, over 400 pages, and shows in the broadest sense how the local terrain had an impact on all manner of human conflict." – Fortress Study Group

Throughout history, nature – its resources, landscape and terrain – has shaped the tactics of warfare and determined its outcomes. From the medieval English Fens to the 20th century Iraqi Marsh Arabs, landscapes have fostered resistance and dissention. Harnessed by people under threat the landscape has influenced strategies and tactics.

Water and wetland halted campaigns in the Florida Everglades and in the Franco-Prussian War of the late 1800s. In the Second World War the Dutch flooded the drained polders to halt the Nazi advance and in 1938 the Chinese nationalist forces breached the flood-dykes of the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance.

Mountain ranges and deserts have long provided landscapes for resistance fighters. From the former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan these gnarly battlescapes traverse time and space. Libyan fighters held off invading Italian forces by operating from the caves and valleys of the Green Mountains and the Welsh defended their mountainous principalities against the Angevin Normans.

The landscapes and heritage of past conflicts, defensive and offensive structures, and much more are brough together in this comprehensive study.

Ian Rotherham discovered York Castle on a childhood trip by steam-train from Sheffield in the 1960s, and has been going back ever since. He is Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in Tourism & Environmental Change at Sheffield Hallam University; as an ecologist and historian, he is a worldwide authority on landscape history, urban environments, and environmental aspects of conflicts. He has researched and written about York and Yorkshire for many years, campaigning for their conservation, improvement, and wider promotion. Having published over 500 papers, articles, books and book chapters, he has a popular BBC Radio Sheffield ’phone-in and writes for local and regional newspapers, particularly the _Sheffield Sta_r, the _Sheffield Telegraph_, and the Yorkshire Post. His book Yorkshire’s Forgotten Fenlands (Wharncliffe, 2010) is one of several he has written on York and Yorkshire. Ian lectures widely to local groups and works with bodies like the Wildlife Trusts, Natural England, Historic England, English Heritage, the National Trust and the RSPB. A Regional Tourism Ambassador for Sheffield and South Yorkshire, he works on major tourism and conservation projects across the county. He is a Fellow of the York-based PLACE (People, Landscape and the Cultural Environment) research centre.