It is well known that the exact location of the action is not firmly established for many of the battlefields featured here. It has also become clear that in almost every case the character of the landscape at the time of the battle is also largely unknown. Yet understanding the historic terrain is critical to understanding a battle.

In preparing these pages it has not been possible to carry out the level of research needed to address these shortcomings. However in a few cases limited documentary research has been conducted on original historic maps and a few other documentary sources. Archaeological evidence for the historic landscape has also been sought for all the featured battlefields within the air photographic collection of the National Monuments Record and, for selected battlefields, from the county Sites and Monuments Records. In several cases this has yielded important evidence. For example there are the exceptional ridge and furrow earthworks which survived in the 1940s at Edgehill, enabling the mapping of the open field systems which existed there in 1642. At Sedgemoor there is the dramatic evidence of the major drainage ditch across which the battle was fought. At Towton, thanks to the help of David Hall, a mapped reconstruction of the medieval open field system of the battlefield has been compiled from a new field survey.

Projects that the Battlefields Trust has run at Edgehill and Bosworth have researched the terrain at the time of the battles and this information is presented within the Resource Centre's pages.  As of March 2019, work is ongoing at Mortimer's Cross to establish the landscape there at the time of the 1461 battle. 

But this work has hardly scratched the surface. What is required are detailed studies, such as that undertaken on the above sites, if the many fundamental questions about the historic terrain of most of our battlefields are to be resolved. A basic methodology for such work on English battlefields has been published in:

• Foard, Glenn, 'Sedgemoor 1685: Historic Terrain, the Archaeology of Battles and the revision of Military History', Landscapes, vol.4 issue 2, p.5-15. (get a copy of the text from the download area on the left of the screen)
• Foard, Glenn, 'Battlefield Archaeology of the English Civil War', British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 2012
• Foard, Glenn and Curry, Anne, 'Bosworth 1485 - A Battle Rediscovered', Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2013