Windgather Press
Windgather Press specialises in publishing accessible and attractive books on landscape history, landscape archaeology, trees, and the history of the British countryside including garden history. Their authors include some of the most accomplished landscape archaeologists and historians writing today. The books are designed not only for those professionally engaged in the subject, but also anyone else with a serious interest in landscape research.
Windgather Press’s name originates from Windgather Rocks, a prominent gritstone edge on the Cheshire/Derbyshire border, close to where the press was originally founded in Bollington, UK.
A Medieval Life Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9781914427435
Pub Date: 21 Feb 2025
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 60 b/w and color illustrations
Description:
A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1324 is a biographical fusion of history, geography and archaeology with a focus on landscape and castles studies, set in the reigns of Edward I and II in the context of early attempts to create by force a single nation on the British island. A central theme in the book is how medieval biography can be written about someone relatively ordinary and not famous without straying into generalisation. The existing general market readership for medieval history focuses on ‘kings, queens and battles’, and this book attempts a different perspective.
RRP: £49.95
The Vikings in the Hebrides Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9781914427398
Pub Date: 15 Feb 2025
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 200 B/W and color illustrations
Description:
The Vikings in the Hebrides provides an introduction to the Viking colonization and Norse occupation of the Outer Hebrides. Our knowledge of this period in the Hebrides has until recently been minimal as the historic evidence was negligible and the archaeology limited. However, two recent excavations at Bornais and Cille Pheadair have transformed our understanding of the period in the region.
RRP: £38.00
A Date with the Two Cerne Giants Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781914427374
Pub Date: 20 Aug 2024
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 75 B/W and color illustrations
Description:
The date of the Cerne Giant has long been a matter for debate, as exemplified by a public and televised debate of March 1996, published as The Cerne Giant: An Antiquity on Trial (1999, Oxbow Books). Excavations were conducted in 2020 by the National Trust in the centenary year of its ownership of the Giant. The excavations were limited and targeted in extent and scope, the aim was to date the actual construction of the iconic figure by absolute dating methods (OSL).
RRP: £24.95
Tudor and Stuart Royal Gardens Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9781914427350
Pub Date: 25 Mar 2024
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 110 b/w, 55 color images
Description:
Monarchs, no less than their subjects, want to impress their guests. This book is about gardens as one aspect of creating favourable impressions – soft power – in particular through the royal gardens of England in Tudor and Stuart times. It addresses the backdrop of palaces, parks and gardens that were unspoken statements of authority and cultural achievement that gave status and credibility to the country’s representatives.
Medieval Bridges of Middle England Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9781914427299
Pub Date: 26 Jan 2024
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 224 color images
Description:
Throughout history, rivers have been a hub for human settlement and have been a key part of local livelihoods, history, and culture, as well as still playing a present-day role in providing services and leisure to people who live around them. It is no coincidence that all four of the earliest human civilisations were formed on great rivers: the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers all saw great human aggregation along them. The most ancient and vital architectural structures linked to the use of rivers are bridges.
Viking Migration and Settlement in East Anglia Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781914427251
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2023
Imprint: Windgather Press
Description:
This book shows how analysis of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in their landscape contexts can provide crucial new evidence of differing processes of Viking migration and settlement in East Anglia between the late ninth and eleventh centuries.The place-names of East Anglia have until now received little attention in the academic study of Viking settlement. Similarly, the question of a possible migration of settlers from Scandinavia during the Viking period was for many years dismissed by historians and archaeologists – until the recent discovery by metal-detectorists of abundant Scandinavian metalwork and jewellery in many parts of East Anglia.
RRP: £39.95
From Hunter-Gatherers to Early Christians Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781914427220
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2023
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
Jutting out some thirty miles into the Irish Sea, from the western edge of Snowdonia, the Llŷn Peninsula, in north-west Wales, is renowned for its stunning beaches and countryside, with much of its landscape designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The peninsula is also home to a remarkable and abundant collection of archaeological sites and monuments, some of national importance, which bear witness to the ancient societies who once inhabited this narrow finger of land on the western fringe of Britain. This abundantly illustrated book examines this rich corpus of archaeological evidence, beginning with the faint but fascinating traces that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have left in the landscape of the Llŷn Peninsula and ending in the early medieval period, with about 9,000 years of human habitation thus covered in its pages.
Seventeenth-century Water Gardens and the Birth of Modern Scientific thought in Oxford Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781914427169
Pub Date: 15 Nov 2022
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
Based on a decade of archaeological investigation and historical research, this book tells the story of the Copes of Hanwell Castle in north Oxfordshire and the creation of a garden with links to the development of scientific thinking in Oxford in the late seventeenth century. New research using Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire as a starting point has uncovered details of a remarkable family and their rise and tragic downfall, their social circle, that included some great names in the development of early scientific thinking, and their garden that in effect became a place dedicated to the wonders of technology. The complex tale weaves together the activities of a royalist agent, Richard Allestree, a prodigious musician, Thomas Baltzar, John Claridge, a Hanwell Shepherd with a penchant for weather forecasting, and Sir Anthony Cope who in an atmosphere of secrecy and distrust began to gather together a community that eventually was named by Plot as The New Atlantis, a reference to a book published earlier in the century by Sir Francis Bacon in which he suggests a model for a Utopian science-focused society.
Medieval Bridges of Southern England Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781914427138
Pub Date: 15 Aug 2022
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
Throughout history rivers have been a hub for human settlement and have long been a key part of local livelihoods, history and culture, as well as still playing a present-day role in providing services and leisure to people who live around them. It is no coincidence that all four of the earliest human civilisations were formed on great rivers: the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers all saw great human aggregation along them. The most ancient and vital architectural structures linked to the use of rivers are bridges.
English Orchards Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781914427190
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2022
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
Old orchards have an irresistible appeal. Their ancient trees and obscure fruit varieties seem to provide a direct link with the lost rural world of our ancestors, a time when the pace of life was slower and people had a strong and intimate connection with their local environment. They are also of critical importance for sustaining biodiversity, providing habitats, in particular, for a range of rare invertebrates.
Surveying the Domesday Book Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9781914427107
Pub Date: 15 Feb 2022
Imprint: Windgather Press
Description:
The Domesday Book, commissioned in December 1085 by order of William The Conqueror, is generally thought to have been used to assess wealth and assets to collect taxes, and represents an incredible wealth of information on land-use, local economies, and even land disputes between neighbours. This innovative analysis of the Domesday book from the perspective of a professional land surveyor and valuer aims to calculate a timetable for its creation, along with analysing the survey’s purpose, the nature of the data collected, and how it was used. By reverse-engineering the survey, Simon Keith proposes that while the document was an outstanding administrative success as a survey, it was in fact a fiscal failure which was never used directly to collect any taxes.
RRP: £34.99
Fen and Sea Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781911188964
Pub Date: 15 Nov 2021
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
Renowned environmental historian I.G. Simmons synthesises detailed research into the landscape history of the coastal area of Lincolnshire between Boston and Skegness and its hinterland of Tofts, Low Grounds and Fen as far as the Wolds.
RRP: £34.99
Thomas White (c. 1736-1811) Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9781914427008
Pub Date: 15 Nov 2021
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
This volume aims to restore the reputation of Thomas White, who in his time was as well respected as his fellow landscape designers Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and Humphry Repton. By the end of his career, he had produced designs for at least 32 sites across northern England and over 60 in Scotland. These include nationally important designed landscapes in Yorkshire such as Harewood House, Sledmere Hall, Burton Constable Hall, Newby Hall, Mulgrave Castle as well as Raby Castle in Durham, Belle Isle in Cumbria and Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire.
RRP: £39.99
Monuments in the Making Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9781911188438
Pub Date: 15 Sep 2021
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: 100 photos, mostly in colour & black and white illustrations
Description:
In this book we offer an exciting new perspective on a distinctive form of megalithic monument that is found across most areas of northern Europe. In order to achieve this we have abandoned outmoded typological classifications and re-introduced the term ‘dolmen’ to embrace a range of sites that share a common form of megalithic architecture: the elevation and display of a substantial stone. By critically assessing the traditionally assigned role of these monuments and their architecture as megalithic tombs, the presence of the dead is reassessed and argued to form part of a process generating vibrancy to the materiality of the dolmen.
The Late Medieval Landscape of North-east Scotland Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9781914427046
Pub Date: 10 Aug 2021
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: B/w and colour
Description:
The landscape of the north-east of Scotland ranges from wild mountains to undulating farmlands; from cosy, quaint fishing coves to long, sandy bays. This landscape witnessed the death of MacBeth, the final stand of the Comyns earls of Buchan against Robert the Bruce and the last victory, in Britain, of a catholic army at Glenlivet. But behind these momentous battles lie the quieter histories of ordinary folk farming the land - and supping their local malts.
Historic Bridges of Buckinghamshire Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9781911188926
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2021
Imprint: Windgather Press
Illustrations: Colour
Description:
Bridges have always played an important role on the social and economic history of human development, and Buckinghamshire has a great wealth of them. Trade systems and road networks must solve the challenges of geography’s waterways, and bridges, causeways, fords, and flood systems were necessarily a key aspect of the experience of historical travel. Bridges and river crossings anchored the Buckinghamshire road network in the landscape, and once established it proved remarkably durable.