Prairie fields

This landscape type is characterised by featureless expanses of countryside created by widespread removal of boundaries, hedgerows, woods and other landscape features in order to produce the vast tracts of open land. Roads and perhaps farm buildings may be amongst the few surviving historic features. This land rationalisation has been undertaken to enable modern, mechanised arable farming.

This type of farming appears after 1950 with the advent of powerful farm machinery.  In Buckinghamshire the majority seems to have been created in the last twenty years of the twentieth century due to the incentives offered by the European Union. Arable cultivation will have removed most surface traces of earlier activity, although truncated buried remains will probably survive. Some farms may retain historic buildings but even those on historic sites will probably be amongst the most altered.