Castles and Communities: Using the taskscape to explore the attitudes, activities, and lived experience of wider communities in castle landscapes bet

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This project analyses the lived experiences of the non-elite communities who inhabited the landscapes around medieval castles in Herefordshire and Suffolk. It will apply the concept of the 'taskscape' (Ingold 1993, 153) to understand how the presence of castles affected the everyday experiences of these communities and considers how castles were perceived by them. In doing so, the project addresses a recognised lacuna in research around the non-elite experiences of castles and their landscapes (Creighton and Liddiard 2008, 166; Creighton 2018, 367), building on successful analyses of castles and their landscapes as places of lived multi-sensory experience (Johnson 2018a & 2018b; Cooper 2014).The concept of the taskscape has been explored and expanded across numerous academic fields since its 1993 inception, and for the purpose of this project it is the intertwining of spatial and temporal dimensions of the castle landscape that will help advance our understanding of the experiences of the castle. Indeed, taskscape is a means of understanding landscapes in terms of the temporal rhythms of the activities which took place within them, anchoring these activities in physical space, making it an ideal tool for investigating the multiple ways in which castle landscapes were inhabited and experienced in the Middle Ages. The reconstruction of taskscape relies on combining multiple forms of data relating to the different scales of experience and activity which comprise them. As such, this project will develop a GIS-based approach to incorporate multiple strands of data including historical mapping, evidence from archaeological investigations and finds reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, as well as historical data. This approach will allow for castle taskscapes to be modelled as dynamic and changing spaces, shaped by the activities which constituted them.