[2] Hoskins defines the theme of the book in the first chapter, arguing that a landscape historian needs to use botany, physical geography and natural history as well as historical knowledge to interpret any given scene fully.

The concluding chapter, however, laments the damage done to the English countryside by "the villainous requirements of the new age"[3] such as military airfields and arterial roads, describes the new England as barbaric, and invites the reader to contemplate the past.

The introduction sets out Hoskins' stall with "No book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have",[4] mentioning geology ("only one aspect of the subject"),[4] the clearing of woodlands, the reclaiming of moor and marsh, the creation of fields, roads, towns, country houses, mines, canals and railways: "in short, with everything that has altered the natural landscape.

These are closely integrated into the text; for example, the text in chapter 1 is accompanied by a pair of diagrams showing how a holloway ('hollow way') could be formed by the digging of a "double ditch", i.e. a pair of raised earth banks either side of a ditch to mark the boundary of two estates, and supported by a photograph (Plate 13) of a sunken lane in Devon, explained by Hoskins as a boundary, from probably the 7th century, between the Saxon estates of (royal) Silverton and Exeter Abbey.

The book covers its subject in 10 chapters: Hoskins uses the first few pages of this chapter as an introduction, beginning with praise for William Wordsworth's A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1810), and from which he quotes a passage in which the reader is asked to envisage "an image of the tides visiting and revisiting the friths, the main sea dashing against the bolder shore".

[6] Hoskins writes that on a desolate moor one can feel oneself imaginatively back in time to the Bronze Age, but that there are now few such unaltered places left.

He argues that the landscape historian "needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian"[7] to understand a scene in full: For what a many-sided pleasure there is in looking at a wide view anywhere in England, not simply as a sun-drenched whole, fading into unknown blue distances, like the view of the West Midland plain from the top of the Malvern Hills, or at a pleasant rural miniature like the crumpled Woburn ridge in homely Bedfordshire; but in recognizing every one of its details name by name, in knowing how and when each came to be there, why it is just that colour, shape, or size, and not otherwise, and in seeing how the various patterns and parts fit together to make the whole scene.

Hoskins begins the section on "Marsh, Fen, and Moor" with the words "There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement".

"Buildings in the landscape" briefly describes abbeys, churches, mills, bridges and castles built to serve the growing population, which just before the Black Death had tripled since Domesday.

There were extensive heaths and wild places, largely uninhabited, with "no industrial smoke, nothing faster on the roads than a horse, no incessant noises from the sky".

He begins by quoting the rural poet John Clare: "Inclosure, thou'rt a curse upon the land, and tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann'd".

He names transformative inventions such as Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 and Hargreaves's spinning jenny of 1767, and comments that Matthew Boulton opened his steam engine factory "in the still unravished country"[13] outside Birmingham in 1765.

[14] Hoskins describes roads and trackways from the Iron Age (like the Jurassic Way across the midlands, near his Oxfordshire home) and Roman times (like Akeman Street in the same area).

Still in his home area, he records that "the wide green track now called Dornford Lane"[15] was built in the 10th century for supplies to be carted from the Anglo-Saxon kings' own estate at Barton.

Hoskins devotes over a page to each of two quotations from Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, describing the construction in 1836 of a railway in Camden Town.

Hoskins concludes with a brief chapter, with one image, Plate 82, "The completed English landscape" showing a tall tree in a wide open field, a strip of hedges and villages just visible in the distance.

The chapter laments the damage caused to parts of the English landscape, mentioning bulldozers and tractors, nuclear bombers and by-passes, and ends by celebrating again the wealth of detail within a few hundred yards of Hoskins' study window at Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire.

Her review ended by remarking that Hoskins "views the industrial revolution with mounting horror, and the industrialists themselves are bitterly chastised as 'completely and grotesquely insensitive.

'"[20] She noted however that Hoskins had happily moved to "a quiet spot in Oxfordshire where he can forget the 'barbaric England of the scientists, the military men and the politicians' and look out of his study window on to the past",[20] where, she wrote, he "draws for us a last tender and evocative picture of the 'gentle unravished English landscape.

[20] Penelope Lively, writing in The Guardian, describes the book as a marvellous, robust, opinionated account of the landscape as narrative, whether rural or urban, the visible record of what has gone before, once you know how to read it – or once he has told you how.

It was as if the landscape was all of a sudden an archaeological dig – hills and dales, woods and copses, fields and rivers, villages and roads ceased to be simple features of a view.

[22]The local historian Graeme White, in The Medieval English Landscape, 1400–1540, calls Hoskins' book "brilliantly-crafted" and observes that "Although this famously railed against the 'England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil' – along with much else belonging to the mid-twentieth century – the fact that national car ownership more than doubled during the 1950s made this a subject whose time had come.

And those long gentle lines of the dip-slope of the Cotswolds, those misty uplands of the sheep-grey oolite, how they have lent themselves to the villainous requirements of the new age!