What makes a landscape distinctive?

A landscape is the visible features of an area of land. The UK has three broad physical landscape types:

• Upland — high, rugged land, often hard rock, high rainfall (e.g. the Scottish Highlands, Snowdonia, the Lake District).
• Lowland — flatter, lower land with softer rock, warmer and drier (e.g. East Anglia, the South East).
• Glaciated — shaped by past ice (e.g. the Lake District's U-shaped valleys).

Their character comes from their geology (rock type), climate and human activity (farming, settlement, tourism).

Built vs natural: a natural landscape (a mountain) is shaped mainly by physical processes; a built landscape (a city) is shaped mainly by people.

Processes that shape the land

OCR names five groups of geomorphic processes:

• Weathering — breakdown of rock in place: mechanical (freeze–thaw), chemical (carbonation) and biological (roots).
• Mass movement — material moving downslope under gravity: sliding and slumping.
• Erosion — wearing away by water: abrasion, hydraulic action, attrition, solution.
• Transport — moving material: traction, saltation, suspension, solution.
• Deposition — dropping material when energy falls.

Which process?

Coastal landforms

Where hard and soft rock meet the coast, differential erosion forms headlands and bays. On a headland, erosion of a line of weakness gives a famous sequence:

• Erosion landforms: headlands, bays, caves, arches, stacks.
• Deposition landforms: beaches (constructive waves) and spits (longshore drift where the coast bends).

River landforms

A river changes along its course. Key landforms OCR names:

• Upper course (steep, high energy): V-shaped valley, waterfall and gorge (a waterfall retreats upstream leaving a steep gorge).
• Middle course: meanders (erosion on the outer bend, deposition on the inner bend) which can become an ox-bow lake when the neck is cut off.
• Lower course (flatter, deposition): floodplain and levees (raised banks built by repeated flooding).

Meander → ox-bow lake: erosion narrows the neck of a meander until the river cuts across it during a flood; the old loop is sealed off by deposition, leaving a curved ox-bow lake.

Match the landform to its course

Tap a landform on the left, then tap its correct description on the right.

How a waterfall forms

Two UK landscapes

OCR requires one coastal and one river landscape case study. Widely-taught examples:

• Coastal — the Jurassic Coast (Dorset): hard limestone/chalk and softer clays give headlands and bays (Lulworth Cove, Durdle Door arch, Old Harry Rocks stacks). Geology and wave energy shape it; management includes sea walls at Swanage.
• River — the River Tees (NE England): from Pennine uplands to the North Sea. High Force waterfall (hard Whin Sill dolerite), meanders near Yarm, and a wide floodplain and mouth at Middlesbrough.

Exam tip: for each landscape, link the landforms to the geomorphic processes, the geology and climate, and how human activity (e.g. management) affects it.

Your turn — headlands and bays

Coastal or river landform?

Tap a landform, then tap the box it belongs in.

Erosion or deposition?

Is each landform made mainly by erosion or by deposition?

An ox-bow lake

Transport process

The key ideas to know

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