THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH LANDSCAPE - Dr Francis Pryor

When I heard that Francis Pryor, best known for his role in TV’s Time Team had written a book on ‘The Making of the British Landscape [Penguin - £30]’, my first though was - why? WG Hoskins work; ‘The Making of the English Landscape’ has always been the classic book on the subject and still seems relevant today. So why a major new treatise? In his introduction, Dr Pryor pays tribute to Hoskins but points out that his book was written in 1955 and that archaeological techniques have been improved and refined and that science has provided us with many new tools. Interpretation of finds has also changed; although I do wonder if he had his tongue in his cheek when he tells us that the people of the Western Isles were not savages but a civilised race, as there is now evidence that they drank claret!

Dr Pryor does demolish a number of cherished beliefs, but to be fair, does so with good cases backed up by evidence. He points out that the dark ages were not a time of regression but progress continued, perhaps at a slower pace. He indicates that at many times life was not so nasty or brutish, but that quite advanced social systems were in place. A cynic might think that the route to academic advancement is to rubbish the theories of other academics, but one does not get that feeling with this book. It is packed with facts and details, which are best taken in small bites, but it is a most comprehensive story of Britain from the Neolithic period to the present day, covering a lot of the urban as well as rural landscape. Like your reviewer, the author has a farm and pays tribute to the family farm in shaping the landscape and warns us of the effect of its demise. The book has a lot of photographs and drawings, although some of the black-and-white ones had a rather old-fashioned look, perhaps intended to be evocative of the past. It is not a cheap book, but at nearly 700 pages of text, plus notes and 250 photos and maps – it is a fascinating account of why Britain looks as it does today.