Landscapes

ISSN: 1466-2035 (Print) 2040-8153 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ylan20

Islandscapes: Isolation and Pressure

Hans Renes
To cite this article: Hans Renes (2014) Islandscapes: Isolation and Pressure, Landscapes, 15:1,
44-58, DOI: 10.1179/1466203514Z.00000000023
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1466203514Z.00000000023

Published online: 20 Jun 2014.

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Date: 02 May 2016, At: 21:14

landscapes, Vol. 15 No. 1, June, 2014, 4458

Islandscapes: Isolation and Pressure

Hans Renes

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Utrecht University and VU University Amsterdam

Islands are interesting subjects for study, with their frequent fluctuations in
population size and economic activities, and their propensity for being at once
both isolated from and dependent on the outside world. They are often seen as
metaphors for human societies faced with environmental dangers and
limitations, and (on a larger scale) for the world as a whole. Using examples
from different parts of Europe, and with a focus on the Wadden Sea, this article
analyses the specific island-ness of their landscapes character. In periods of
population pressure, islandscapes developed into pressure-cooker landscapes, with very intensive agriculture and extremely small-scale field patterns.
In these situations, the sea acted as a safety valve: many islands typically show
mixed economies of agriculture combined with shipping or fishing. In other
periods, migration led to much lower population numbers, and some islands
even became unpopulated. In the present phase of globalisation, many have
ceased their agricultural activities, but others manage to continue cultivation
by specialising in specific crops, and yet another group now use their
landscapes for that other major global industry, tourism, very often
capitalising on their heritage landscape character that is a result of the
alternating periods of activity (creation) and stagnation or desertion
(preservation) that appear to be characteristic of islands in the first place.
keywords Islands, Landscape, Heritage, History, Europe

Introduction
Everywhere on the European coasts we find islands, large and small. They are
fascinating places, often with a dynamic history and with special attributes. Their
appeal lies in their special character, attracting large numbers of visitors trying to
get away from it all. On many islands, tourism is now a major economic activity
but one that brings a fragile prosperity that island dwellers often compare with the
poor living conditions of the past.
Islands are often used as metaphors for human society as a whole. Thomas More
(in 1516) placed Utopia on an island and most utopias have followed his example
ever since. In environmental studies, islands are popular tropes for human societies
occupying dangerous and limited environments, being seen as isolated, and as
Oxbow Books Ltd 2014

DOI 10.1179/1466203514Z.00000000023

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regions that quickly reach limits of growth or expansion (Dodds and Royle 2003).
Ecologists make frequent use of island theory to explain the species richness and
vulnerability of isolated natural communities.
On a larger scale, islands act as a metaphor for the world as a whole. Perhaps
the best-known example is Easter Island, which figures prominently in bestselling
books such as Clive Pontings A Green History of the World (1991) and Jared
Diamonds Collapse (2005). For Diamond, Easter Island is a clear example of a
society destroying itself by over-exploitation of its resources (Diamond 2005, 118).
Some writings of this type, however, could be viewed as projections of the writers
ideas rather than as historical studies. Concerning Easter Island, for example, most
recent researchers (Anderson 2002, 3823; Rainbird 2002; Boersema 2011) tell
the completely different story of an isolated island that survived relatively well,
and came under threat of depopulation only when contact with the outside world
was renewed after its discovery by Roggeveen in 1722. During the 1850s and
1860s population numbers declined as people were shipped to South America as
labourers, at first more or less voluntarily, but soon by force, and between 1862
and 1872 slave raiding alone almost destroyed the population, from an estimate of
at least 3,500 in 1862 to a documented figure of 2,000 in 1864 (the first reliable
estimate), and to 111 in 1872 (Diamond 2005, 901, 112; Boersema 2011).
Islands are also interesting from the perspective of landscape studies. Together
with coastal landscapes and the sea, islands form what the Danish archaeologist
Christer Westerdahl termed the maritime cultural landscape (Westerdahl 1992;
Rainbird 2007, 3; Fischer 2012). But islands differ from most coastal areas in their
isolation, a feature that may have led to their special characteristics, here referred
to as islandscapes (Broodbank 2000, 21). Although many geographers, historians
and archaeologists have an interest in islands (Fitzpatrick 2004; Rainbird 2007),
the specific theme of island landscapes has rarely been studied systematically. The
starting point for the present article was therefore to ask if it is justified when
islands are concerned to speak of a distinctive type of landscape, which have been
termed islescapes (Peil 1999) or, as here, islandscapes. The discussion uses
examples from different parts of Europe, notably the Wadden Sea islands, and
sometimes of other parts of the world, and is focused on three themes: isolation,
connections, and fluctuations.

Isolation
Isolation is perhaps the first characteristic that comes to mind when one thinks of
islands. When early medieval Irish monks searched for solitude, they moved to more
remote islands, eventually even reaching Iceland (Karlsson 2000, 9). For them, the
sea was their desert, connecting them with earlier hermits in the Egyptian desert
(Rainbird 2007, 45). Isolation, in a geographical but even more in a mental sense,
has long been the reason for using islands as prisons and places of exile or
quarantine. The most famous today may be Alcatraz and Robben Island, but Europe
had its own island-prisons, such as Makronisos (Greece), Asinara and Gorgona
(Italy, the latter still in use) and of course the Chateau dIf (near Marseilles, France),
made famous by Alexandre Dumas. Spinalonga was a leper colony off Crete, and

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Lampedusa (between Sicily, Malta and Libya) is today known mainly for being a
refugee camp for migrants from Africa trying to reach Europe.
A qualifying remark is necessary, however. Islands are rarely completely
isolated; exploitation of the surrounding seas may be shared with off-island
communities, for example, and the existence of a population is in itself proof that
contacts have existed in the past. In fact, the polarity between isolation (islands as
cultural laboratories) and interaction (islands as reticulate networks) may well
be the main characteristic of islands (Renfrew 2004, 276).
The world of an island becomes limited to the island itself only when the
possibility of shipping disappears. Such a situation can occur when no ships from
elsewhere reach an island community that itself is not capable of building ships or
rafts. A number of Pacific islands seem to have been in this situation (Anderson
2004, 257). Another example was Greenland, a very large island but nevertheless a
small and extremely isolated community that prospered for a few centuries in the
Viking period but lost contact with Europe when its exports (furs and polar bears)
could not compete with cheaper competitors from elsewhere. Although for
centuries, up to 1347, the Greenlanders continued to sail to Labrador (Markland)
to forage for wood, this also eventually stopped (Diamond 2005, 209); perhaps at
a certain time their last ship was lost and, living in a treeless land, they had no way
of replacing it. There were other factors, of course (a colder climate and the return
of an Inuit population better adapted to the environment, for example), but the
fact is that the Scandinavian Greenlanders disappeared within a few generations
after losing contact with the outside world. Even more populous Iceland went
through a problematic period during the late Middle Ages when trade contacts
with Europe diminished and the population was left almost on its own, resulting
eventually in a drastic reduction in the number of inhabitants.
At this point it may be interesting to introduce a model developed by the Dutch
archaeologist Bert Groenewoudt for the occupation of the isolated ridges that
provide dry and therefore habitable spaces in the marshes of the Eastern Netherlands
(see Figure 1). His model shows a hierarchy of larger and smaller areas, in which the
largest have been continuously occupied since prehistory, whereas the smaller ones
could not survive independently and were only occupied as satellites of the larger
regions in times of population pressure (Groenewoudt and Scholte Lubberink 2007).
This model can apply equally to islands, for example the three Pacific islands
discussed by Jared Diamond in Collapse (Diamond 2005, Ch. 3). Two of them,
Pitcairn and Henderson, could only support small populations when they were
connected with the third, Mangareva by a trade network in the period A.D. 1000
1450, and even then only about a hundred people on Pitcairn and a few dozen on
Henderson. When contact was broken, the settlement of those two islands
eventually failed. Pitcairn was only repopulated in an exceptional circumstance,
by the well-known mutineers of the Bounty, and now has some 50 inhabitants.
This brings up the question of the minimum population size for survival in
isolation, which is partly a matter of sustainability, and partly of vulnerability and
resilience. A small and isolated population could be completely wiped out by a single
flood (although there are no known examples of this: Goff et al. 2012) or volcanic
eruption, or by a few successive slaving attacks by pirates. Such attacks almost

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figure 1 Groenewoudts model of settlement

expansion and contraction in a landscape with
coversand ridges in the Eastern Netherlands
(Image: Groenewoudt and Scholte Lubberink 2007,
60).

caused the depopulation of Easter Island, as we have seen, and in the Mediterranean,
some islands may have been completely or almost completely deserted for certain
periods for the same reason (Kiel 2007, 37, 42; Rackham 2008, 53). Most Greek
islands that were described as deserted for this reason during the 15th and early 16th
centuries were resettled during the 1570s (Hasluck 1910/1911).
An interesting case with regard to minimum population size is the former Dutch
island of Schokland. Between 1749 and 1812, this island had a stable population
of about 600 people divided into two groups, Protestants and Catholics (c. 30 and
70 per cent respectively), which rarely mixed. The difficult economic circumstances made the island unattractive to immigrants, meaning that most people had
to find partners on the island. During this period, 194 Roman Catholic weddings
were registered. In 108 cases (56 per cent) dispensation had to be given as the
partners were related in the second, third or fourth degree (Klappe 1986),
illustrating the vulnerability of a small population. The island was eventually
threatened by coastal erosion (in fact it had only become an island by coastal
erosion in the mid-15th century: Hogestijn 1992, 110), and in 1859 the national
government judged the situation too dangerous and decided to evacuate the
population (Geurts 1997). To everyones surprise, the island survived until the
1940s, when it became integrated into a newly reclaimed polder landscape (see
Figure 2). It is now a World Heritage Site.
Another island evacuated by the government is St Kilda (see Figure 3), the most
remote island of Scotland and also a World Heritage Site (Fleming 2005). For
centuries, this island supported a population of 50 to 200 people. From the end of
the 19th century substantial emigration took place, and after some decades the
population passed the minimum of what was considered viable. In 1930, when there
were not enough able-bodied people left to man a boat, the remaining 36 islanders
asked to be evacuated and St Kilda was left to the birds (Harman 1995, 19).
Other islands have been lost altogether, for example Griend and most of Strand,
respectively in the Dutch and the German parts of the Wadden Sea. Generally, the
loss of an island is felt more than the loss of a strip of coastal land and many lost
islands have had an afterlife in folklore.

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figure 2 Left, The deserted island of Schokland in 1935. A few years later, the island would become part of the newly created Noordoostpolder. Aviodrome, Lelystad, The Netherlands. Right,
The former island of Schokland after incorporation into Noordoostpolder (Photo: Paul Paris).

Connections
But isolation is not the complete story: most islands were connected to the outside
world and hardly any have ever been completely self-supporting, although Easter
Island, without sea-going vessels, came very close to a complete dependency on its
own land. The large majority of islands imported part of their necessities and
luxuries. In return, they could export agrarian products (a point to which I will

figure 3
The remains
of the village
on St Kilda
(Photo:
Fleming
2005, 16).

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figure 4 Captains houses at Mykonos

(Photo: author).

figure 5 The mill of Karaes

on the island of Ouessant
(Brittany, France). In 1900
the island boasted 100 mills.
Karaes is the last remaining
mill of the island, and disused
for several decades (information on plaque) (Photo:
author).

figure 6 Deserted fields on Ouessant (Photo: author).

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return), fish and perhaps handicrafts, and also offer services such as sailors and
even ships to mainland shipping companies (see Figure 4).
Some islands have probably been used since prehistory as safe places for
entrepots, but here only a few examples from historic periods are given. An early
(14th15th-century) example is Pemba, for the East African coast (Rainbird 2007,
17), while in Europe the Greek island of Chios acted as an entrepot and as the base
of a sailing fleet until the first years of the 17th century, when it was superseded by
the mainland town of Izmir (Mansel 2010, 1718). The Greek islands of Spetses,
Psara and Hydra together commanded an important position in the 18th-century
merchant fleet of the Ottoman Empire, a position they only lost with the rise of
steamships. This is also true of many other islands that owned large numbers of
wooden sailing ships but proved unable to make the step to the much more capitalintensive steamship business (for example, Jersey: Le Feuvre 2005, 60, 120). In the
land Islands, between Sweden and Finland, with
20th century, the poverty of the A
its low wages supported the survival of the last commercial company in worldwide
trade with sailing cargo ships.
Another activity was fishing, but in commercial fishing small islands were often
at a disadvantage compared to mainland harbours with better connections to
inland markets. The Dutch Wadden islands, for example, had important fishing
fleets during the late Middle Ages, but lost them during the Early Modern Period
to mainland competition. The islanders continued fishing, but on ships owned by
mainlanders (Smit 1971, 2). During the 17th and 18th centuries, whaling was
another important activity on some of the Wadden islands, again in the service of
Amsterdam ship-owners (Brouwer 1936 11). On Nordmarsch, for example, about
a hundred men were engaged in whaling in 1720 from a total population of 394
(Riecken 1982, 30). The whaling tradition was revived in 1946, when an
Amsterdam ship-owning company manned a factory ship with a captain and quite
a few sailors from the Wadden island of Schiermonnikoog (Donraadt 1972).
Islands were also agrarian landscapes. Most inhabited islands have been used for
agriculture, often stretching an islands literally finite resources to their limit. This
was particularly true for isolated islands, and many islands bear traces of
agriculture on places that would elsewhere be seen as too marginal (Kuhlken 2002)
and on extremely fragmented fields, an effect rather like that of a pressure cooker.
One typical feature of islands is the way that agriculture was combined with
shipping and fishing. The activities on water and on land influenced each other and
this relation often reflected economic fluctuations in the wider world (Boatswain and
Nicolson 2001, 147). The Dutch geographer Gerrit Smit, in his PhD thesis on the
island of Terschelling, spoke of the agrarian-maritime structure of the island (Smit
1971). In periods in which shipping and fishing prospered, agriculture may have
received less attention, as there was sufficient income to buy goods from elsewhere.
When both types of activities became problematic, temporary or permanent
emigration took place. On many islands in Europe, a substantial part of the male
population was at sea for part of the year, leaving the women, together with children
and the elderly, responsible for agriculture. This could mean that a substantial
proportion of the women never left the island, whereas men could often travel much
more widely a gender-specific polarisation in experience. However, in periods in

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figure 7 a) and b): The first land re-allotment scheme in the Netherlands was executed in
the extremely fragmented meadows of the village of Ballum on the island of Ameland (the
Netherlands) in 1916. Figure 7a shows the old allocations, 7b the situation after land
consolidation (Image: Dienst Landelijk Gebied, Utrecht).

which maritime activities were less successful, the whole island population fell back
on agriculture and islands became more self-supporting.
The island of Ouessant in Brittany (France) was one of the islands with an
important shipping tradition that meant agriculture was mainly in the hands of
women. The islands open fields must have been used extremely intensively during
the 19th century; by 1900, with a population of 2,900, the island had a hundred
small mills for grinding locally grown barley (see Figure 5). Before 1852, part of
the harvest was brought to the mainland by fishing boats, but after the transport of
goods by fishing boats was forbidden, the whole harvest had to be processed on the
island. During the 1880s, grain was gradually replaced by potatoes, and
subsequently imported foodstuffs undercut the viability of island agriculture.
Today, agriculture has almost disappeared, the former arable lies waste and the
sheep pastures are under-grazed (Brigand et al. 1992) (see Figure 6).
The combination of shipping with very intensive agriculture can also be found
on the Wadden Islands. The Dutch Wadden island of Ameland may act as an
example (Abrahamse et al. 2005). During the 17th century, people from Ameland
sailed along the North Sea coasts to France and to the Baltic. Between 1650 and
1750, some 80 ships with a captain from Ameland passed the Sound between
Denmark and Sweden each year (Faber 1972, 603). In addition, sailors from
Ameland and other Wadden Islands formed an important part of the crews of
17th- and 18th-century whaling ships, and when the Wadden Island fleets
disappeared from the middle of the 18th century, the islanders kept working in
whaling ships and, when whaling declined during the 18th century, in longdistance shipping. During the 19th century, however, many sailors on Ameland,
especially the most prosperous, left for the mainland, and agriculture regained
importance.
A number of what are known as commanders houses (commandeur was the
local term for a captain of a whaling ship) were converted into farms at this time

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figure 8 This commandeur house (now Johan Bakkerstraat 7, Hollum) is the oldest house on the
island of Ameland. The date 1516 appears on its gable, but it has been suggested that the numbers
are mixed up and that 1561, 1615 or 1651 could be the construction date. The large shed was
attached early in the 19th century when the house became a farm. Source: http://
oudstehuisameland.webklik.nl/page/oudstehuisameland [accessed 13-8-2012]; Stenvert et al.
2000 (Photo: author).

figure 9 The extremely small-scale pattern of drystone walls on the Aran Islands.
Photography by Irish Welcome Tours, available under Creative Commons (http://www.flickr.
com/photos/irishwelcometours/4909582031/sizes/l/in/photostream/ [accessed 29-9-2013]).

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(see Figure 7; Brouwer 1936, 11). However, the extreme fragmentation of land,
not a problem while agriculture was a side activity, gradually came to be seen as
problematic. In 1885, of 219 farmers, 140 used less than 5 ha and only 15 used
more than 10 ha (although use rights on the commons should be added to this
figure; Brouwer 1936, 35, 548). Originally, the hay meadows were periodically
redistributed, so that every farmer received a number of dispersed fields. When the
periodic redistribution was abolished, the most recent allocations were made
permanent, and thereafter partible inheritance caused further fragmentation
(Brouwer 1936, 23). In the village of Ballum, for example, when voluntary land
consolidation was carried out in 1916 (the first in the Netherlands), as many
as 2,000 fields with an average size of 0.085 hectares were owned by only 119
people (see Figure 8) (Brouwer 1936, 8991; Groeneveld 1985, 3441). In the
neighbouring village of Hollum the situation was worse, with 272 owners owning
4,897 pieces of land, with arable land and hay meadows being particularly
fragmented. Here, consolidation was delayed until 1925, after the new national
Land Consolidation Law had made it possible to overrule the four remaining
opponents (Brouwer 1936, 914; Groeneveld 1985, 39).
Most islands had systems of partible inheritance, which belonged to situations in
which paucity had to be shared, and this could result in an extreme fragmentation
of landownership (Le Feuvre 2005, 46). The most extreme example may be Malta,
(Houston 1964, 642). Nowhere in the Mediterranean can such high densities of
terraces be seen as in isolated regions, including a number of small islands. An
extremely fragmented field pattern can also be found on the Aran Islands, off the
west coast of Ireland. Again, this fragmentation is explained by population
pressure (Aalen et al. 1997, 139; see Figure 9).
There was also the long-term effect of increasing globalisation. In medieval
times, many islands were more or less self-supporting for basic foodstuffs. On
many islands, in North-western Europe as well as in the Mediterranean, open
fields could be found, pointing to the importance of grain production. Some of the
larger islands, particularly Sicily, exported grain, but on most small islands grain
was probably grown mainly for local consumption (Kiel 2007, 41). During the
Early Modern Period and into the 19th century, most islands became more
strongly integrated within larger economic systems, connected to the phase in
globalisation that is usually known as the European world-system, and this process
of course continued throughout the 20th century.
Small islands were at a disadvantage in competing against mainland settlements
in an open economy because of lesser economies of scale and longer transport
times. Cheap transport by ship made many islands competitive producers of
agricultural products until the 19th century, but after that date improvements in
land transport (railways and metalled roads) eroded their competitiveness. Cereal
growing in particular has declined as a result on the large majority of islands.
Some islands developed new methods to compete. Between 1978 and 1995, the
Wadden island of Ameland transported its milk to the mainland by a pipeline, the
first of its kind; it is now used for a fibre optic connection, another way to lessen
isolation (Groeneveld 1985, 41; http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melkpijpleiding
[accessed 13-8-2012].

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A more typical method of competing was by converting agrarian products into

products with more value per weight unit. During the late Middle Ages, large
quantities of sheep wool and cheese were exported from the largest (and closest to
Amsterdam) Wadden islands of Texel and Terschelling (Smit 1971, 66) and the
inhabitants of smaller neighbouring islands specialised in exporting woollen
sweaters and socks. During the 16th century, Faroe islanders started to export
hosiery and turned this into an important business (Thorsteinsson 2008, 83).
Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, even became the generic name for a type of
garment that in its heyday was, incidentally, largely made from imported wool (Le
Feuvre 2005, 827). Inhabitants of the same island also made cider from apples,
another way of increasing the price per unit of weight (Crowden 2006).
An alternative method for competing with mainland markets was an increasing
degree of agricultural specialisation, and many island landscapes show traces of
this. The Scilly Islands in the far south-west of England specialised in early
potatoes, made possible by the extremely mild climate. To protect these potatoes
against the strong winds, a large number of hedges were planted. A similar step
was taken by the Channel Island of Jersey, which in the late 1800s compensated
for its diminishing export of cider by using south-facing slopes to grow early
potatoes for the English market. During the first half of the 20th century the island
also became very successful with early tomatoes. Another successful export
product of this island, particularly during the 19th century, was the Jersey breed of
cattle (Le Feuvre 2005).
At the other end of Europe, on the Greek Islands, we see comparable processes.
The island of Aegina, close to Athens, specialised in pistachio nuts, Chios in
mastic, Tinos in doves, some of the Cyclades in garlic and onions, and so on
(Horden and Purcell 2000, 227). Cyprus was already specialising in sugar cane
during the Middle Ages, but was later driven from the market by Madeira and, still
later, by a number of Caribbean islands. During the 18th and 19th centuries (with
a last phase of growth after a large wave of immigration in 1923), the Greek island
of Lesbos developed a very intensive terraced olive cultivation, together with local
factories that produced olive oil and olive soap (Kizos and Koulouri 2010), again a
method for improving the relation between value per weight unit and transport
costs. Such changes are reflected in the landscape, where open fields gave way to
enclosed landscapes.
We see this process still taking place today. In the present globalised markets,
islands can only survive as agrarian producers in niche markets. In recent decades,
some of the Dutch Wadden Islands have turned to organic dairy farming, with
cheese and cottage cheese as their main export products, marketed on the
mainland under the Wadden brand.

Fluctuations
Many islands have seen marked fluctuations in population size over the centuries but
also on much smaller time scales, and even (for example in the case of modern
tourism) on a seasonal scale (Vernicos et al. 2007). Many European islands reached
their largest population size and the most intensive phase in their agricultural history

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during the 19th century (for example, Ouessant; Couix and Le Berre 1996) or
slightly later (the islands of Estonia reached their maximum agrarian utilization in
land Archipelago between
the 1930s: Peil 1999, 150). Of the 6,500 islands in the A
Sweden and Finland, 80 were inhabited in the 1790s, nearly 100 in 1855 and 150 in
the 1890s, followed by a decline through the 20th century to some 60 inhabited
islands today (Stora 2008, 447). The Hebrides, west of Scotland, were densely
populated until the 1840s, when the forced depopulation of crofting communities
to make way for extensive sheep farming that had started almost a century earlier on
the Highlands (the clearances), reached the islands (Muir 2009, 201).
On most islands, population growth is today mainly dependent on the success of
the tourist trade, but the position of agriculture varies. Most Greek islands, for
example, saw their populations decline during the 1950s and 1960s; there has
since been a recovery as a result of mass tourism but on many Greek islands
agriculture remains under threat as young people move to the towns to earn a
higher income from tourism (and to have more fun) than agriculture could ever
give them. On the Dutch Wadden Islands, tourism is flourishing but farmers derive
additional income from tourism by operating campsites, renting out rooms and
selling farm products. On most islands off the coast of Brittany agriculture is
disappearing, tourism is not very successful and the population is declining (Peron
2004, 329). On Ouessant, for example, the population decreased between 1911
and 1990 by 60 per cent, from 2,661 to 1,065 (Brigand et al. 1992, 613).
However, as we already noted, fluctuations have been part of the history of
almost every small island. Most were open economic systems that were influenced
by the outside world. When island landscapes differ from mainland landscapes, it
is because these small and more or less isolated places show stronger fluctuations
than most other places.

Conclusions
Many islands are today considered as heritage landscapes, and the combination of
isolation and connections, as well as the resulting fluctuations, has relevance to this
perception. Implicitly or explicitly, it is often taken for granted that heritage
landscapes are concentrated in peripheral regions that are seen as backward and
stable. The Dutch geographer Gerrit Smit, for example, often referred to the Wadden
Islands as places where the fact that early medieval settlement structures could still be
found suggested a large degree of stability (Smit 1971, 1988). The term cultural
landscape hotspots recently introduced by Solymosi (2011) presupposes the
influence of isolation and poor agricultural land and, often, a population differing
from the national mainstream. Whilst for the third of these it is questionable whether
cause or effect is at play, the first two points are related to marginality.
Islands, with their large demographic and economic fluctuations and with their
alternating phases of connections and isolation, expose the weaknesses of this
vision of marginality. Instead, the most interesting heritage landscapes occur in
places that have known periods of prosperity and of high population pressure, in
which these landscapes became complex and full of landscape features, followed
by periods of stagnation and desertion in which these landscape features were

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preserved and had a chance to become old enough to be designated as heritage. It is

the alternating periods of pressure and stagnation that led to the heritage
landscapes or relic landscapes, the latter a term that might be traced back to the
German geographer Georg Niemeier (1961). The Orkney Islands are a case in point.
These are now part of the margin of a marginal part of the British Isles but during the
Neolithic period they seem to have prospered; during the Viking Age the islands had
a central position in the integrated political and economic space of the northern
North Sea region (a situation described in the national saga Orkneyinga).
Many islands reveal such stories of change, but we must realise that there are
other comparable island-like places, hence the ongoing discussion of whether an
archaeology of islands is a useful theme for archaeologists (Rainbird 2007;
Fitzpatrick 2004). Oases in the desert, remote valleys and hills in marshy areas are
only some of the examples that come to mind. In theory, even in towns such places can
exist, as in the novel Vergeten straat (A Forgotten Street) by the Belgian author Louis
Paul Boon (1946), who writes about an urban street that becomes completely isolated
when its only entrance is closed off by a railway embankment because of a planning
mistake; only after some months is the mistake discovered and an opening made. In
the isolated street an anarchist experiment takes place, which fails in the end.
Still, there are a number of characteristics of islands that together are significant
enough for us to speak of islandscapes. This is not because islands were stable and
can be studied as examples of surviving historic landscapes. Rather, it is a result of
the combination of isolation and connectedness and the strong fluctuations in
economy and demography. Periods of high population pressure led to an
extraordinary intensity of farming. In some periods, intensive connections to
external markets could be the basis for interesting specialised landscapes or,
alternatively, an almost complete abandonment of agriculture.
The alternation between periods of highly intensive and highly extensive
farming (the former creating complex landscapes, the latter preserving them with
high visibility) has produced a perception that islandscapes are amongst the most
important heritage landscapes in Europe. It makes islandscapes an important
resource for local soft tourism, although on many islands conflicts exist between
the values of landscape and heritage and the large-scale development of coastal
mass-tourism. In the long term, the mass tourism may turn out to be just another
phase in this long history of economic fluctuations.

Acknowledgments
The author is very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to the editors of
this journal for commenting on an earlier version of this article and for sharing
their ideas.

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Notes on contributor
Hans Renes teaches Historical Geography at Utrecht University and occupies a
chair in Heritage and Planning at VU University Amsterdam. He has written
extensively on landscape history and heritage, in the Netherlands and Europe.
Contact: j.renes@uu.nl