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On the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea that traces of the past survive in the present had thus expanded beyond the point of simply observing ruins and monuments still present in the landscape, to the consideration of broader spatial structures. Several authors used the notion of the “palimpsest” to communicate the idea of temporal collisions, originally in the sense of an accumulation of forms from different periods. This metaphor has proved remarkably durable, used over several decades, with variations in meaning reflecting changes in the way in which we understand the notion of time in a landscape.

The term “palimpsest” was used from ancient times to denote a tablet or sheet of parchment, which was scraped to remove earlier text prior to reuse. From the Renaissance on, chemical techniques were used to read the undertext of palimpsest manuscripts; these techniques became increasingly sophisticated, reaching their height in the 18th century (Larousse 1898, p. 628; Gaffiot 1981, p. 1105). The metaphor began to be applied to landscape in the 19th century; the first recorded instance is found in the work of F.W. Maitland (Lucas 2012), who studied dispersed habitat of presumably Celtic origins “from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen’s guidance we are beginning to decipher)” (Maitland 1987, pp. 15–16). Maitland belonged to a school of thought in which landscape was compared to text, and elements in a landscape were analyzed using semiological techniques. In 1934, the historian H.J. Randall again used the palimpsest metaphor, indicating that elements in a landscape should be seen as signs, and that their assembly constitutes a historical document in the same way as written documents. For Randall, maps provided a record of history, inscribed into the landscape: