Historic Landscape Characterisation is the most significant methodology within recent initiatives to understand and manage the historic landscape in the UK. This paper will examine a particular form of regional landscape created by enclosure and the popularisation of foxhunting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the 'shires'. It will argue that characterisation programmes are ill-equipped to recognise cultural processes that have shaped the landscape through the short and medium term and, as a result, we risk losing local landscape character and diversity. It also questions how characterisation defines and engages with 'communities' as demanded by the European Landscape Convention.