This book review covers a wide range of subjects, but I guess it fits here as well as anywhere else:
The Making of the British Landscape by Nicholas Crane review – how the sun shaped the land
This magnificent book, ranging from the ice age to the present, considers the influence on the countryside and cities of climate, geology and a long history of immigration
Andrea Wulf
Friday 30 September 2016 14.00 BST
Around 12,000 years ago Britain was still connected to the mainland of Europe. Glaciers covered much of the north while the south was an arid wind-blasted tundra with grasses, mosses and low shrubs. Around 9700 BC, it became a little warmer, and that’s where Nicholas Crane’s story begins. As he argues in this ambitious, magnificent book, Britain’s destiny was shaped to a surprising degree by the sun and by southerners. It’s a tale of stops and starts – devastating at times, uplifting at others.
As temperatures rose, the ice melted, greenhouse gases surged and Britain became greener. Crane, an explorer and geographer, writes evocatively about this changing landscape. “Relieved of its burden, the Earth’s crust sprang slowly upward in the far north,” while the coastline of the south was reconfigured by rising sea levels. River courses altered, trees grew taller and animals such as deer and boars arrived.
With them came the woodland people who, unlike the early hunters, lived in large groups and stayed for a while in one place. They brought tools and made flames with wooden fire drills. Britain’s geology provided them with a vast array of stones, which in turn produced a new sound: “a rhythmic knocking accompanied by high-pitched tinkling” – the sound of the woodland people fashioning them into tools and objects. Meanwhile Doggerland, the area that connected Britain to the continent, was facing the onslaught of rising seas; its inhabitants marched west to escape. Britain has always been a land of migrants.
The first “little ice age” hit around 6700BC. About 500 years later, a huge North American lake broke through its dam and dumped such a huge amount of fresh water into the Atlantic that the Gulf Stream shut down. Temperatures plummeted, trees died, sea water pushed into rivers and Britain’s landscape changed again. Only 200 years later – a geological blink – a tsunami crashed over Doggerland. Britain became an island and isolated. Two thousand years later it was nearly inhabited, and then the climate changed again. The next wave of immigrants arrived – the “house people”, who crossed the channel in their boats and built the first rectangular houses.
They bred animals, grew grains, cleared forests and sculpted the land, leaving traces of human activity on the landscape. Crane describes growing populations, Stonehenge and new materials – copper, iron, bronze. “Technology ages landscapes,” he writes, as ore was hacked out of the land and enormous numbers of trees were used for smelting. By 1000 BC, more of the south of Britain was patterned by rectangular fields – in Dartmeet, for example, a grid covered 3,000 hectares. Then another little ice age hit. Then it got warmer again. And so it goes, up and down. Forts were built, and later lowland settlements, goods arrived by ship, and raw materials left the island.
When the Roman emperor
Claudius invaded Britain in AD43, he came, Crane says, with “an army of psychopathic builders” and the British landscape was soon altered beyond recognition. Camps and towns were built along gridded streets. Trees were felled, turf was cut, ditches dug and streams diverted to lace the island with roads. Within four generations, Britain had 24 major cities, palaces, amphitheatres, mosaic flooring and hot baths. It was warm and the soil produced food. And then the climate changed once more.
Crane is excellent at describing climate, geology and shifting shorelines, but is at his best when plaiting together earth-shaping events with humankind and civilisation.
[To TV viewers Crane is probably best known as one of the presenters of BBC's "Coast" - the one with the umbrella stuck in his ricksack!] The end of the Romans in Britain, for example, was linked to a 40-year drought in inner Asia, which started in 338 and pushed the nomadic Huns westwards, who in turn drove the Goths into the Roman empire. With their hands full on the continent, the Romans had problems defending Britain and trade routes were affected. Britain was attacked, looted and robbed. Taxes were raised, which meant people couldn’t afford goods any more, and production slowed: “life leeched from British towns”. By 407, the Romans had left and an air of disrepair veiled the south.
Crane takes his readers from the farmed countryside and the urban boom of the Norman conquest to the freeze in the early 1300s, which was rapidly followed by rains and famines – and then the first wave of the Black Death in 1348 (after which came several more). As the population fell from 6 million in 1300 to 2.4 million in the 1440s, the landscape changed again: villages were abandoned and fields left unploughed.
etc...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/30/making-of-british-landscape-nicholas-crane-review
And you can buy a copy cheap through the Guardian Bookshop!