I’m very happy to have a guest contributor to the CHLs discussion. Welcome Henry Cary!
Henry, a cultural heritage specialist and archaeologist with Golder Associates, takes a detailed look at the official guidance materials on cultural heritage landscapes in Ontario over the years and poses some hard questions about the application of current approaches to rural landscapes.
A keen follower of this blog, I’m honoured that Dan gave me this opportunity to put down some thoughts on identifying, evaluating, and protecting rural cultural heritage landscapes (CHLs), a subject I’ve long been interested in and now have the good fortune to pursue professionally.
As noted in a previous post, how CHLs have been defined in Ontario has changed considerably over the past three and half decades. Just as these definitions have evolved, so too has the academic and applied understanding of CHLs developed, in turn influencing the approaches heritage professionals have used and the official guidance to identify CHLs as part of Environmental Assessments (EAs).
In Ontario, the first document to provide guidance on CHLs for EAs was the 1980 Guidelines on the Man-Made Component of Environmental Assessments, released by the then Ministry of Culture and Recreation. Despite its gendered title, the Guidelines were forward-thinking for including discussion of “cultural landscapes” and in the evaluation criteria it recommended.
At the time, even cultural landscapes we take for granted now — such as heritage conservation districts (HCDs) and formal gardens — were relatively recent inventions in Ontario. Just five years previous John Stewart and Susan Buggey had made the “Case for Commemoration of Historic Landscapes and Gardens”[1] to the federal government, and it was not until the same year the Ontario guidelines came out that Ontario’s first HCDs were designated in Kingston (Barriefield) and Mississauga (Meadowvale).
Perhaps reflecting that early understanding, the evaluation criteria listed in the Guidelines explicitly favoured a visual and “present” state of landscape, one with “the use and appearance of land as we see it now as a result of man’s activities over time in modifying pristine landscapes for his own purposes” and “perceived as a collection of individual man-made features.” Cultural landscapes, defined as a “discrete aggregation of man-made features” had to have one of eight “attributes”, five of which were primarily visual, such as it be “part of a network of landscape categories…and presents to the moving eye opportunities for special sequential experiences or series of visions of distinctive scenic views.”
Historical association was explicitly only one criterion, that the landscape be “exemplary of distinctive cultural processes in the historic development and use of the land.” Citation for nearly identical language to the Guidelines in John Weiler’s “Planning and conservation of man-made heritage in Ontario” revealed that its inspiration was from both the UK and US[2].
Twelve years later the Ministry of Culture and Communications released the Guideline for Preparing the Cultural Heritage Resource Component of Environmental Assessments, a document that lumped “cultural and historical landscapes” under “Heritage Resources.” Mirroring Kalman[3], these were to be evaluated for their age, context, rarity, integrity, historical significance, and community interest, although in the “guide to photographing heritage structures and landscapes” the 1992 Guideline advised including the “pattern of structures, boundaries, and lines of communication”, three of the ten “landscape characteristics” identified in the first US National Park Service “rural historic landscape” guidance[4].
The definition of CHL in the Guideline glossary showed a slight change from the earlier Guidelines to be “groups of features made by people”, but also seemed to relegate CHLs to the status of setting, as they “can provide the contextual and spatial information necessary to preserve, interpret or reinforce the understanding of important historical settings or changes to patterns of land use.”
Note that this definition was also the first to add the modifier “heritage” to CHLs, although in the rest of the document there is mention only of “cultural landscapes” or “cultural and historical landscapes.”
The military landscape of Kingston from the air. The significance of these sites is understood through the interrelationship of landscape (much of it artificially created), waterscape, and inter-visibility, all of which with little regard for parcel boundaries (photo by H. Cary).
By 2006, CHLs were firmly entrenched in the Ontario Heritage Tool Kit, with InfoSheet #2 of Heritage Resources in the Land Use Planning Process directly referencing the 1992 UNESCO Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention with its “designed landscapes”, “evolved landscapes”, and “associative landscapes” categories. Identifying CHLs was no longer primarily visual but based on “historical research”, “site survey and analysis”, and evaluation against the O. Reg. 9/06 and 10/06 criteria.
However, the visual element was not entirely discarded, instead addressed under the heading “Defining cultural heritage landscape boundaries.” This focus on boundaries marked a clear divergence from the earlier guidance and the academic study, which understood rural cultural landscapes as having fuzzy edges. In the Tool Kit, hard edges — such as roadways, rights of way, or river corridors — were needed to clearly define areas “for conservation purposes within a land use planning context.” What InfoSheet #2 lacked in CHL guidance, the Tool Kit’s Heritage Conservation Districts guide made up for, much of it again drawing on the US National Parks Service approach with four characteristics of “concentration” of features, “a framework of structured elements”, “visual coherence” and “distinctiveness.”
CHLs got their own sub-heading in the ministry’s 2010 Screening for Potential for Built Heritage and Cultural Heritage Landscapes Checklist. Providing a much needed role to advise on evaluation was the 2014 Heritage Identification and Evaluation Process guide approved by the ministry for use in implementation of the Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Provincial Heritage Properties. However, this document introduced the additional terms of: “setting” (not defined); “integrity” (how well the key attributes illustrate the value); and “character”, the latter defined as “a combination of physical elements that together provide a place with a distinctive sense of identity” that “may include geomorphology, natural features, pattern of roads, open spaces, buildings and structures, but it may also include the activities or beliefs that support the perceptions associated with the character.”
While it may not include human agency, this definition for character is close in principle to the PPS 2014 definition for CHLs. Even then, agency in the PPS 2014 definition had changed from “a geographical area…which has been modified” to “a geographical area…that may have been modified” (emphasis added), reflecting the fact that cultural landscapes can have intangible values and do not always required evidence of alteration.
By the 2016 iteration of the EA screening checklist (now called the Criteria for Evaluating Potential for Built Heritage Resources and Cultural Heritage Landscapes: a checklist for the non-specialist) ways to identify CHLs were distributed through the questionnaire and under ‘Other Considerations’ is the advice to consult local authorities and historical maps, among other sources.
In many ways independent of the official guidance, professional practice in Ontario since 1980 had accumulated new jargon, such as “roadscapes”, “railscapes”, and “waterscapes”, even though these were more likely to denote individual features rather than a combination or aggregation.
Elsewhere landscape study took on added complexity, with landscape character assessment, historic landscape characterization, historic area assessment, and Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment developing in the UK, and a wide range of guidance for rural places being refined and expanded in the US. The second edition of the national Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada published in 2010 mirrors the US approach to cultural landscapes, and some jurisdictions such as Quebec have produced detailed advice incorporating both the US and characterization methods[5].
Ontario’s ordinary countryside from the air, illustrating the ‘waterscapes’ (river and lake front), ‘designed’ landscape of surveyed lots and concessions (with jog to cross the river) and evolved landscape of field boundaries, trails, woodlots, irrigation ponds, farmsteads and even golf course (photo by H. Cary).
It would seem then that in 2018 we have access to a broad body of knowledge to identify, evaluate, and recommend conservation for CHLs in Ontario EAs and otherwise. However, for estates, formal gardens or golf courses this may be true, but for rural landscapes the broader understanding of such places has diverged from provincial legal and regulatory requirements.
The first issue is identification and definition. Rural landscapes — and this can often include mining or industrial sites, or battlefield and military sites — often have none of the hard edges of formal gardens or estates, and include an accumulation of diverse features through time that cannot be simply reduced to “farmscapes” or “waterscapes”, neatly packaged with parcel boundaries or discernible from a map.
For example, if we take the example of a road, say one with a particularly evocative 19th century name like Cheese Factory Road, we could consider its alignment on an 18th century survey ideal as a potential attribute, as well as its soft shoulders and shallow ditches. However, this represents only the most narrow and minimal collection of landscape features, excluding most of its visual and historical context that includes fencelines, open fields, treelines and wood lots, houses and outbuildings, as well as its connections to and from other places, and maybe the archaeological remains of the cheese factory itself, if not the evidence of Indigenous occupation centuries before the road was laid. This follows the spirit of the PPS 2014 definition for CHLs but in EA practice recommending this expanse be conserved is rarely attempted as the “defined geographic area” requires legal boundaries, most within the invisible lines of the surveyed right of way. In InfoSheet #2, “roadways” are listed as a possible boundary, when in reality they are more often the central artery.
The second issue is evaluating for significance. What would make this “roadscape” significant? Would it be its association with a now defunct, but once vital rural industry, reflected in the number of “Cheese Factory” roads across Ontario? Or would it be its level of preservation or “integrity”? Or could it be because of its authenticity — a term not included in the Ontario guidance — as an evolved landscape, one not divided by estate lots but cultivated by farmers running their equipment out of farmsteads (some that may no longer have buildings 40 or more years old) just as had been done since the 19th century?
And what would make this section of “Ontario’s ordinary countryside”[6] more significant than any other lot and concession. Unlike the value-laden “built heritage resource”, following Stilgoe[7], landscape is a noun and so to meet the modifier “significant” we must make rigorous identifications based on a thorough understanding of the landscape — its history, its associations, its integrity, its authenticity — all of which are likely to extend past the parcel boundary.
If that significance is met, what mitigation do we recommend in the face of a proposed development? Do we simply document with photographs and descriptions, with the knowledge that unlike standing buildings there was no definitive start and will be no definitive end to the landscape?
The cultural landscape of the ordinary countryside in Beverly Township as seen from the road, which stretches far from the roadside with no clear boundary. There are also a number of known archaeological sites within this view. In 2007 this area was proposed for a 400-series highway, later abandoned after objections from multiple municipal government stakeholders and community groups.
Or do we argue that the proposed development cause such harm that the scheme be wholly abandoned? For a cultural resource with unclear, shifting boundaries this would be a hard sell, since much of the rural countryside has little of the “monumental” qualities of a single historic building or streetscape, and in inventorying what can be seen from the roadside there is potential to miss the places in between, the evolved landscape with a combination of rich archaeological resources, high authenticity and intangible values, yet few or no standing historic structures. Stakeholders are often better positioned to make that point, with local activism such as the Stop the 424 increasingly considering their heritage far more intangibly, as a way of life, as an interaction of humans and natural environment, and for the connections between places and to the features that survive only in name, such as Cheese Factory, not just the old houses.
Like Dan I’m keen to see the new provincial guidance on CHLs — but also anticipate that recognizing and conserving Ontario’s ordinary countryside, with its archaeological record of thousands of years of indigenous land use, designed landscape of lots and concessions laid out on an 18th century ideal, and all the modifications over the past two centuries, will remain a challenge.
Notes
Note 1: Stewart, John and Susan Buggey. The Case for Commemoration of Historic Landscapes and Gardens. Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology 7.2 (1975): 99-12.
Note 2: Weiler, John. Planning and conservation of man-made heritage in Ontario. Continuity With Change: Planning for the Conservation of Man-Made Heritage. Mark Fram and John Weiler, eds. Pp. 1-32. Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1984.
Note 3: Kalman, Harold. The evaluation of historic buildings. Environment Canada, Parks Service, 1980.
Note 4: Melnick, Robert, Daniel Sponn, and Emma Jane Saxe. Cultural landscapes: Rural historic districts in the national park system. Park Historic Architecture Division, Cultural Resources Management, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1984.
Note 5: Paquette, Sylvain, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, and Gerald Domon. Quebec Landscape Management Guide: Reading, Understanding, and Enhancing the Landscape. Gouvernment du Quebec, Quebec City, 2009.
Note 6: McIlwraith, Thomas F. Ontario's Ordinary Countryside. Journal of Geography 83.5 (1984): 234-239; The Ontario country road as a cultural resource. Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 39.4 (1995): 323-335.
Note 7: Stilgoe, John. What is Landscape? MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., 2015.
Henry Cary, Ph.D., CAHP, RPA is a cultural heritage specialist and archaeologist with Golder Associates and adjunct professor in Department of Anthropology at Saint Mary's University, Halifax. He has previously worked for Parks Canada in Ontario and the Western Arctic, CH2M in Calgary, and as heritage manager for the Town of Lunenburg UNESCO World Heritage Site. Growing up in Sheffield Ontario, he got his start in heritage as an interpreter at Fort George National Historic Site, going on to study precontact archaeology and social anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University and University of KwaZulu-Natal. For his Masters in historical archaeology from Memorial University he excavated the 1752 Moravian mission station near Makkovik Labrador, and after working as project archaeologist for the Fort Henry National Historic Site Conservation Program, completed his PhD on the fort’s planning, architecture, and engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada. Although he returns to Ontario (and Sheffield) frequently, he lives with his wife and three girls in Sackville, New Brunswick, on the edge of the vast cultural landscape that is the Chignecto Isthmus.