Dan Snow's History Hit - The British Landscape: 12,000 years of history

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

Nicholas Crane is a geographer, explorer, writer and broadcaster. He has written and presented four notable television series for BBC Two: Coast, Great British Journeys, Map Man and Town. The Making Of The British Landscape: From the Ice Age to the Present is out now.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's that time of the week when we put out an episode of the podcast that went out years ago that most of you weren't to listen to because you weren't in on the action that early on. You weren't early adopters of the History Hit podcast. Well, luckily you're here now and you'll be able to listen to it because it's a classic. This features the geographer Nicholas Crane, who many of you will know as the guy who presented the television series Coast in Britain and went on to make other shows like Map Man and Town as well. But in fact, he's a brilliant writer and has been both before and since those BBC shows.

I first came across him when he brilliantly walked from northwest Spain, Santiago de Compostela, along the Pyrenees. He noticed that you could walk from one end of Europe to another virtually along mountain ranges. So he walked along the Pyrenees, skibdaddled over the south of France, got into the Alps. Then from the Alps, you're in the Carpathians and all the rest of it. And he got to Istanbul. Unbelievable. Anyway, Slavsky wrote another even more important and brilliant book about the British landscape. It's a history of the British landscape and how much us humans have messed with it. I love this podcast. It was so interesting talking to him. So I hope you enjoy

it. If you want to watch TV shows, don't forget you can go and do so at historyhit.tv. It's our digital history channel where all of these back episodes of the podcast are without any ads. And we've also got a huge number of documentaries, which are growing by two or three every week. Always new material going on there. At the moment, First Britain is the most watched show ever on History Hit TV. Mesolithic, Stone Age. I mean, where are my 18th century fans, folks? Come on, let's do this. And if you really want to listen to wonderful historians in the flesh, come to our live tour. It's history.com slash tour.

We'll see you all there. In the meantime, everyone, here is the very brilliant Nick Crane. Hello, everyone. Right, I've got Nicholas Crane here, presenter of many TV shows, bit of a legend here in the UK, and writer of this enormous book. You often have an umbrella in your backpack, not this time. We're going to talk about this big book, but first of all, I'm going to admit to being a little bit of a secret fan boy, Nicholas Crane. When I was travelling, I was on my gap year, I was backpacking, and we didn't have any phones,

we didn't have any things that we had to read books, and you'd stop in hostels, and there'd be knackered old books lying around. And I picked up book i've never heard of you i'd never it was a book about a maniac guy who walks across europe from the atlantic the crashing water the atlantic all the way to istanbul via only using the mountains it was a brilliant it's such a simple idea i can't believe i'd never seen it before pyrenees alps uh carpathians yeah carpathians and that, must be very annoying, huge semicircle and then down to Istanbul. And I just remember thinking it was the coolest book ever. And then years later, I found out that you were the guy that'd written it. And of course, I'd seen you on TV shows ever since.

Yeah, I like simple ideas. And that was just a watershed walk. So I was walking from west to east with my left boot effectively in northern temperate Europe, my right boot in warm Mediterranean Europe, right the way across the continent one side to the other and i thought lots of other people go and do the same walk afters but i don't think anyone's ever done that oh no i thought yeah i assumed it would become a bit of a thing it's too hardcore that's why no one's else done it but but you had to you did you did all the unglamorous bits as well you know between the ponies and alps you had to like go and sleep in under motorway sort of um underpass

and stuff like that didn't you yeah there were only two sections where that where i was out of the mountains for a day one was crossing uh the rhone and the other was yeah and both both you can walk across both those river valleys in a day and and they were interesting in rhyme you're a man who understands battlefields but uh uh in in that gap where the uh where the danube flows between the end of the alps and the beginning of the Carpathians. You've got Vienna, Bratislava, battlefields, and Roman Karnuntum. I slept in Roman Karnuntum in the barracks there, just to kind of rekindle those Roman connections. And so even the flat areas had stories. But I didn't even realise, it was only two days out of the month. That is an amazing thing.

You have written so well about sort of geography and historical geography over the years you're weaving together of the geography and the history and that book was so impressive and of course this is your this is everyone is saying and i agree this is the this is the absolute best book to be written on that on that subject in certain terms of british isles they're making the british landscape the older i get the more i study history and look at history and think about history it does seem to me that the geography is absolutely vital we all toss on about you know european empires and of course it's all about malaria and disease and about rivers and and the congo being unnavigable but the zambesi being more navigable than nah you know it's actually we are we are simply little fleas that exist on the

rump of this vast planet and the geography absolutely shapes it it's a it's a it's a tricky relationship isn't it that sliding scale of geographical determinism i know how far along that scale do you allow yourself to go in in deciding that geography shapes history and i it's it's tricky and i think you actually have to choose your point on that scale between geography and history according to the the story you're trying to tell. And in this particular one with landscape it's quite far towards the geographical end I think because history is very very good at events, geography is quite good at processes and so you just have to choose where on that scale you're going to be and with evolving landscapes it's quite far

towards the processes's end. So there's not a lot of scope for talking about battles in a book about landscape. But there is occasionally scope for talking about monarchs who... Actually, there's only one monarch I can think of, King Alfred, who actually had a dramatic effect on landscape. And the Romans, of course. And so you get historical events that can affect. Well, let's break it all down into chronology. But briefly, I do feel a bit naughty, you know,

admiring people like Jared Diamond and you who point out these huge things that are often slightly beyond the human visual spectrum, whether it's microbes, whether it's natural resources that land on the soil. And I think I was raised in an era where it was still very much the history is talking about great men. It was about these geniuses who just bestowed the narrow earth like colossi and I think

the more the more of these kind of books the more of this kind of thing that goes on I think we'll have a richer and deeper understanding of the past so thank you well I'm very flattered by everything you're saying Dan because uh this this this was a long project um how did how long did it take uh it took me 8 years to write and I've been thinking about it for about 30 years You must start as a child There's a man called W.G. Hoskins who published a book in

1955 called The Making of the English Landscape and all geography undergraduates as ancient as I am had to know that book by heart It was the book that introduced historical geography to students which is what you're talking about, the book that introduced historical geography to to students and which what you're talking about the idea that geography can shape history and um it's it's it was a it was a overused word but seminal book and we had to know it by heart effectively and i'd often looked

at it and thought maybe i could you know revisit it and update it because 55 is a long time ago and and hoskin started it was a it was a book about the English landscape so he of course started with the Anglo-Saxons and he finishes of course in 1955 he doesn't cover Scotland or Wales so I thought well maybe there's a bigger story if I was to bring in Scotland and Wales and then go back to the end of the Younger Dryas this this ice age moment right so you go back 12,000 years the end of the let's just let's take this book on chronologically I should say we are streaming this podcast on our Facebook page downstairs history hit uh hello everybody on facebook if you've got questions we will answer them at the end uh we are just um we will we'll

talk about the book first then we're gonna have some questions for nicholas are you nick or nicholas nick nick's fine let's call him nick we're casual here okay so 12 000 years ago here we go let's start book one right so i said even i know we were not an island at that stage so what happened yes so um let's go back to about 10 000 bc and britain is the frigid glacial extremity of a continuous landmass that reaches the whole way from here to kamchatka in eastern asia and south to table mountain in southern africa and we're connected to the continent, not across what's now the English Channel,

but across what is now the North Sea between East Anglia and northern Germany. Glasses in Scotland, 400 metres of ice sitting on top of Rannoch Moor, Great Glen full of ice, glasses in the Lake District and in Wales. And then an episode of extreme climate change temperature bounces up by about seven degrees centigrade in as little as 50 years so it is absolutely mad chaotic crazy um and

so all of this ice just falls apart uh scotland where the people living no there's no people in britain okay no okay good so so this is this is the i should i should go back while we have the ice here, the temperatures are down to minus 17. It is far too cold for human beings. They've all retreated south of the continent. So this is the beginning of the story. Britain is uninhabited.

There are animals here. We have wolves, reindeer probably coming across the land bridge in summer, a wild horse, lemming, steppe hiker. Very, very cold. But when we go through this episode of extreme climate change temperature bounces up and people move across the land bridge now known as dogger land across what's now the north sea and they're following the herds of of wild range and wild horse and they're about 30 odd sites of these early sites that open the story and so these people are migrants they're they're they're not settled agricultural

people so actually for them the climate change isn't the end of the world they just follow the herds wherever they're going they're quite flexible that's right yeah so yeah the highly flexible and they're they're adapting all the time to the changing climate so they they follow the herds they're hunters they're foragers they're wild people you know i mean they're they are really um you know they're kind of the prototypical Ray Mears of the world. They're out there doing it for real with flint tools and lighting fires to keep warm at night and hunting. And one of the rangers killed on probably what's now Heathrow Airport and dragged the edges of the Colne Valley. And that was one of the early sites where Uxbridge is now.

How fantastic. OK, so then what else? But this climate change, all that ice melts, presumably. presumably so yeah stuff's gonna happen. So cut a long story quite short uh 12,000 year story so the ice melts and uh and people walk across a land bridge and they colonize uh a peninsula a European peninsula this is greening very rapidly indeed so trees move in fairly briskly it's not a kind of march of pines northwards, so seeds being blown on the winds, you get these little pockets of trees growing up all over the place, and the willow

and dwarf birch and so on are being replaced by more enduring species, the pine followed by the broad leaves after that. Until we have a time argued, well it's difficult to say, but maybe 4,000 or 5,000 BC when we have uh tree cover

across most of britain probably about 60 percent tree cover okay maximum 10 000 people and how's our landscape change these big these these river the glacial valleys and all that kind of stuff that i remember from my geography when i was a kid the glaciers are retreating leaving these enormous valleys up especially in the north of the island that's right so uh so you get it so where for example you've got uh let's say wosd walsdale scree so you've got you've got uh u-shaped glacial valleys classic u-shaped you take away the ice the valleys collapse leaving these huge scree slopes and then you have the moraines pushed down by the glaciers when the ice melts you get these these ridges of of rubble and and sand and so on. So there's a ridge in North Norfolk between Cromer and Holt.

But to this day, it's the only mountain range in Norfolk, and that's an old moraine. There's a huge lake formed behind Scarborough in the Vale of Pickering. There's no lake there now, it's all been drained. But back in the Mesolithic, that was a wonderful kind of hunting, foraging ground, a shallow lake, maybe chest deep. And that was the first known post-glacial landscape so that was where archaeologists have found stake holes of circular huts and a headdress that's now in the British Museum. And presumably water was a huge benefit obviously it's fresh water for drinking and fish and things but also water for trade it's easier to travel on water that is on land until very recently in our history so so these are sort of littoral or or riverine maritime communities that are springing up are they yeah so so so what what mesolithic communities like ecotones these these transition zones between

uh the coast and inland where you can you've got a broader scope for surviving so you can forage on the seashore in the intertidal zone, but also you can just stray inland to pick off animals in the woodland and higher up. And the rivers were absolutely critical. It's fascinating to ask the question, why has Britain been so successful? Because we have. It's a remarkably successful island. And one of the reasons is the rivers, as you pointed out. We have a thousand river systems, roughly, in in this country and they're all short and fast we don't you know the longest rivers in

britain are only one eighth the length of the danube which means they're all easy to cross so if you're if you're following herds cross country and it's very easy to walk a thousand miles in a in a year i yeah what did i walk i walked uh six thousand miles in a year and a half so back then it was completely straightforward to walk from one end to the other of britain and back again in a year they wouldn't have thought that was odd and um and none of these rivers are too big to cross and so you were never more probably than five or ten minutes from fresh water which means survival is is is the chance of survival is rapidly vastly increased by having access to fresh water.

Britain is nice and wet. It is, very wet. Okay, so let's go. So this is so exciting. So people are coming back in. There's post holes, so you've got bronze or settlements on crannogs or whatever. Keep going. Yeah, so the first huge transition.

So we have a period from about 9,700 BC right the way through to 4,000 BC, which is roughly half of the story, half of this era, this episode of continuous habitation, when almost nothing happens in terms of human interference with the landscape. We're just hunting and foraging probably no more than 10,000 people in the country. So that's about the population of a small market town. But the single biggest landscape event in that area is not human interference. It's actually a tsunami that comes down the North Sea caused by an undersea slide off Norway that takes out Shetlands, takes out the Orkneys. It's probably that tsunami that takes out Dogland and cuts us

off from the continent. So we have a very brexit situation where we are severed from our euro mates instantly you know in a probably in in in minutes or hours we become islanders and um and that that's the beginning of a of a story of isolation we are marooned on this island 500 million mammals and a few thousand human beings and the population seems to have dwindled but around 4050 bc we have our first euro shock and the farmers arrive in boats oh okay changes so that's the beginning of neolithic okay so farmers arrive from europe um and and i suppose it obviously goes without saying but the creation of britain as an island a geographical fact huge impact on subsequent history on our identity on our um our maritime heritage i mean you you know it's a

foundational fact of british life isn't it that is absolutely huge and uh one of the frustrating things when you when you try and try and investigate this this the the the severance of britain from the continents actually finding out when it happened. You know, you're basically having to go into geology and radiocarbon dating to try and find out when that happened. I think in our lifetime, we're going to see some really exciting archaeology from Doggerland, aren't we? It's all out there.

What is out there on the North Sea? One of the most remarkable books I've read in recent years was put together by three archaeologists who realized that the north sea oil companies had over the decades accumulated this vast resource of data about the sea bed they analyzed it and found that the oil companies while looking for oil had actually inadvertently mapped all these river systems on the floor of the north sea you can actually see the lakes and river systems of dog land amazing amazing come on let's keep going right so we've got the nearly we've got these european on the floor of the North Sea. You can actually see the lakes and river systems of Doggerland. Amazing. Come on, let's keep going.

So we've got the Neolithic. We've got all these European farmers. Now, have they started to change the landscape? Yeah, it's devastating. So they bring domesticated animals. So Britain has no domestic animals at this point. Pigs, cows, sheep. Pigs, cows, sheep.

They bring seeds, emmer wheat. They start cultivating plots. They start tending their animals. This is 4,000. This is about 4,000 BC. 4,000 BC. OK right so just as the egyptians are starting to really gear up things over there exactly we are getting the first signs of agrarian culture yeah okay and we're well behind the curve so we are right out on the edge of the of the european landmass at a time when on the euphrates they're busy living in villages and they're sedentary, they're living in communities and farming. So we're well behind the curve. And

farming meanwhile has crept across Europe year by year and has reached the English Channel, the French side of the channel. So we are, if you like, along with Scandinavia, the last undeveloped preserved wilderness in Europe. And then when it arrives it's devastating

because they almost certainly brought disease because our hunter, forager, forebears weren't used to living with animals. And the transition happened very rapidly. In terms of landscape, the farmers brought traditions of, for example, building permanent monuments above ground. So we get the long barrows, we get portal dolmens, we get henges hinges causewayed

enclosures they were wonderful archaeologists called richard bradley spoke of them as being ultras of the earth you know the the neolithic farmers believed in shaping the landscape altering the earth to their own ends whereas their mesolithic predecessors tended to a very soft footprint you know leave leave nothing but your footprints um uh very gentle and presumably lots of cutting down trees lots cutting down trees yeah and so the wildwoods in rich in fact the wildwood had already been been affected during the mesolithic but once the farmers arrive it's it's it becomes a a contest it's the first two massive contests in britain the contest between cultivation farming and wildwood. The wildwood gets pushed back and back and back and back. And then by the time you get through to about 1500 BC, you get the beginning, you get the first surviving field systems.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is one of the old podcasts, but it's one of the best with Nicholas Crane talking about the history of the British landscape. More coming up after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. is there a single acre of let's start with britain which is left from our ancient past can i go and just commune with the the mesolithic world no there's not there's not i'm afraid dan there's not a single acre left because it's all been modified uh that's not to say that there isn't a lot of beauty of course i'm a big fan but okay okay so okay so these farmers okay we've chopped down trees time to build fields and grazing and sheep and everything like that okay we'd notice started to set up towns and things or no that's a lot later okay towns and villages a lot later so so we have small we have small communities of farmers who are probably still hunting and foraging as well so they're they're it's not as if they came in and imposed

permanent settlements immediately that was a long process of evolution so we've got we've got a transition time when people are they they're growing their crops they're keeping they're tending their domesticated animals but they're also still hunting and foraging because britain is like a gigantic game park you park you can live very well out in the woods and glades and on the seashores so it takes a long time and it's not until about 1500 bc that you see the first rectilinear rectangular field systems preserved on on the british landscape there on dartmoor but there are probably thousands of square miles of them by then. Okay and population starts to go up and this is controversial isn't it this whole idea of do we actually create more

calories and more population when we start to farm I didn't realize what an exciting issue this was in the world of geo history. Yeah I'm not sure if I dare stray there. Okay well let's not but briefly the population goes up does it? Population goes up and I know why the population goes up does that population goes up um and then why the population goes up is in it does population go up because people have found uh food security by living in permanent settlements or are they are they pushing out and out and out and and the the pioneering uh the pioneering uh farmers also foraging and hunting and bringing in so much food that they're able to feed their rising communities and then subsequently gather together in these nodes. So it's a question of, it's difficult to unpick, but there are these permanent settlements appearing by,

well certainly, yeah, by the time you get to 1000 BC, we're dotted in year-round settlements. And do we see exploitation of mineral wealth and empires developing and weapons and kings getting gold and copper and then becoming rich and then beating up other people? And when do we start to see that sort of activity? Well, you can see a very early sign of it was probably the first or second generation

of farmers who arrived um because the the first big modifications of landscape are not actually long barrows or fields they're flint mines in the south downs so there are about 400 different flint mines along the tops of the south downs behind worthing and brighton and they were they didn't have to dig for this flint they would dig it you could pick it up off the surface, geologically the flint on the surface was identical to the flint in the subterranean seams, but they believed there was

value in excavating from these mines. So even at this very early stage, we're having prized stone that was being probably traded or certainly exchanged long distance. So we have stone from the Lake District making its way down to Thames Valley and stone from rum crossing to other scottish islands and so on so so stone's being traded there's a really big um transition in the iron age when we have um

that the um when people have migrated for reasons not entirely clear to hilltops you get the first hilltop enclosures probably probably stock enclosures, which then mutate into hill forts. And then, as you say, elites are apparent on the landscape. And Barry Cunliffe, the archaeologist, has actually plotted the location of hill forts in Wessex and would argue that they were power centres distributed to control blocks of land they

certainly feel like it when you clamber over them it's wonderful okay so we this is ridiculous we have got this long journey to go and we have hardly even started yet and this podcast okay so we we got these ironies hillforts now let's talk about what what is the next massive change for landscape is it the romans it's pesky i'd like to just not quite reach for ems i'd but i know you've got to rush on but there was because. But this is a kind of developmental tragedy in Britain's story. There came a point in the first century BC when we came down from the hill forts and settled in demarcated, low-lying centres that have been given the name Opida. And there were about a dozen of them in

southern Britain. And they were proto-towns. So they had their own mints. They were trading with Europe. They were probably power centres of some kind. And they were centres of population. So it has been argued these were proto-towns. And so we're just at this point, 10,000 years into our story, 10,000 years, we have just got to the point when you could argue we're we're dipping our toes in the waters of civilization we're in contact with the content and at that moment we get invaded by this this army of psychopathic builders who wrecked the place and and set us back 800 years wow so explain how why why so well uh i i i i understand that the romance of of roman fortresseses and hot bars and so on.

But the fact is that when the Romans came, they imposed their own idea of civilization on a landscape that was peripheral to the empire, right on the very edge of it. And it wasn't resilient. So if you just look at towns, for example, we already had the beginnings of towns just before they arrived. So if you just look at towns, for example, we already had the beginnings of towns just before they arrived. They built around or established about 100 towns in Britain during their stay, along with long walls and forts and fortresses and all the rest of it. After the collapse of the Roman Empire... Land a Viking longship on island shores.

Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits

there are new episodes every week all of the towns disappeared we had no towns left at all they simply didn't introduce urbanization in a resilient form i see what so that was the romans went we then went back um to effectively in developmental terms to to to the iron age and we call it the anglo-saxon era the saxons the jutes and Angles came across here. But the buildings they were constructing were very like the Iron Age buildings. They were timber-framed, reed, thatch. They weren't enduring.

They didn't build in masonry. You know, the Romans had brought all these amazing masonry structures and they were building for eternity. But they'd also sort of decapitated any indigenous building tradition okay well that you're speaking of course i'm really thinking about my trips to the congo and place post-colonial societies in africa and elsewhere where yes europeans come in and do loads of building and amazing things and then just

disappear and actually having completely ruined the society which they'd arrived supposedly to revolutionise and civilise. That's exactly it, Dan, absolutely. Just no resilience. And it takes a very long time. You have to go forward to about 880 AD with King Alfred on the throne, and he's kind of the only big historical figure I really talk about in the book,

and he reintroduces urbanisation on a resilient basis. So we have him establishing Britain, Wessex, his land is under threat from the, well, more than under threat, it's under siege from the Vikings. And he establishes these burghs, these walled urban settlements that have two main functions. They're defensive structures for his population, his people, but they also have a market function as well.

So they've got this economic function. And this, of course, is a beginning of permanent urbanisation. Sustainable. Sustainable urbanisation, Alfred. So let's talk about Britain in the period of Alfred, and obviously in Wales and Scotland, lots of diverse and dynamic kingdoms rising and falling, as in other parts of

England at the time uh let's do an invoice um infantry check and animals native species how they do they've been hammered or are they are they doing all right yeah they've been hammered so the aurochs for example which was the uh this magnificent you can't really call a wild cow because it's much more magnificent enormous it's an enormous wild bovine monster that used to roam the Mesolithic forests of Britain with huge horns fantastic for hunting, a huge amount of meat on an oryx

that was driven into extinction probably by the Bronze Age wolves are still prowling by the time we're in the age of Alfred we still have wolves and bears, there's a really interesting moment if we skip forward to the 16th century, where there's a wonderful mapmaker called Timothy Pond, Scottish mapmaker, who has rather been overlooked by the history books because he only left sketch maps.

But he drew a sketch map of Cape Wrath, which is a northwestern point on the British mainland, at a time when at the other end of Britain, London was the biggest city in Britain, a population of 75,000. Timothy Pont drew this map of northwest Scotland, and he labelled it Extreme Wilderness. And this was the kind of the moment the wilderness really vanished from the British and just before he does revolution yeah yeah before the Industrial Revolution in fact there was an interim episode of interference landscape interference in in the 1620s when if you match if you go turn back and think of the post glacial landscape is having two wild elements the forests

the Wildwood and wetlands. The forests had been not entirely wiped out but driven massively reduced by the 16th century so as you know we're running out of shipbuilding timbers and so on. The wetland was still pretty much intact and all the way down

eastern England there was this long chain of wetland from the Humber right the way down to Cambridgeshire so these huge glittering fens separated by the know the isle of ely isle of axholm and so on but in 1621 the moiden dutch engineer comes over starts draining our wetlands and that's the end of the wilderness properly so we've got we've got the wetlands being converted into unbelievably rich agricultural land and that's's a big, big moment. So that predates the Industrial Revolution, but it's laying the basis for interfering with nature on a massive scale. And running out of the back of the draining of the wetlands,

we have the subversion of these wonderful natural river systems, a thousand of them, by building canals. Yeah, we've canalised and sewerised our rivers in this country, haven't we? Exactly. No, it's impossible to talk about ancient rivers because people don't understand what they were. They'd be highways, I agree. So let's talk about that sort of spasm of early modern changing our landscape.

We do the fens. And then talk about enclosures, because this is obviously a big historical thing. This sort of enclosures and private property and the emergence, particularly in England and the lowlands scotland of this sort of patchwork field system we now think is this ancient and immortal um british landscape which actually is quite recent yeah so so the enclosure enclosures was a very long drawn out process there was a uh the medieval field system was was uh one of open fields where you had uh and you can still occasionally

well actually you can still see them out of train windows across central britain but the the ridge and furrow if you if you look at a train window in a low light in winter you'll see these these ridges and furrows and fields so those are the corrugated iron corrugated iron exactly yeah so these were the open field systems and they were huge so in any one village uh each villager or each family would have have their own strip they were cultivated on their own and these banks of earth would pile up deliberately because it allowed the the runoff the water to run into the into the furrows and drain to the edge of the field however um it was pointed out much later on during the agricultural revolution this was a ridiculous way to farm because all the nutrients were washed out of the field in these furrows.

So although we're sentimental about ridges and furrows now, once you had field drainage pipes put underneath the fields, you could then plough all of these ridges and furrows out and then the fields were systematised through enclosure, either by landowners driving the villages off their land control taking hold of a their their entire holding and then rationalising economically rationalising these these huge open fields into small rectangular blocks so we were sentimental about these rectangular fields now but actually they're moderately recent imposed structures

and and then we had parliamentary enclosures, which kind of followed in after that and spelled the end to open field farming. So we went from the medieval open system of original fire to much smaller rectangular blocks. And now we're in a later generation of industrial farming where you've got the smaller fields have been enlarged into larger fields and we have contract farmers playing all night and all that kind of thing. GPS tractors self-driving.

But what's interesting, at the same time to get that huge rationalisation in the countryside, we also see the world's first industrial revolution and that must be an enormous impact on Britain's landscape. It's huge and there's a fascinating debate about why did Britain lead the world

into industrial revolution? And you've talked earlier on about geography steering history sometimes. And I was often wondering while I was writing this, what effect did this extraordinary river system, river network we have on Britain have on the industrial revolution? Because when when you think about it you know the industrial revolution we couldn't have happened without without coal and without iron and without water now the thing about about uh the industrial revolution is that as much as anything it was a it was a it was a a revolution in ideas so lots of individuals not necessarily even, but coming up with brilliant ideas. It might be cotton spinning or whatever. And nearly everybody had access to fast-moving water

in Britain. So almost everyone could have a lab in their back garden. And the nature of the Industrial Revolution was that Britain's population rocketed at unbelievable speeds. So by around 1850, we've got 21 million people living in Britain. And we cross a critical threshold when, by around the mid-19th century, we reached that tipping point when more of us are living in towns and cities and in the countryside. And now, 90% of us are living in towns and cities and 10 in the countryside. So we crossed that tipping point in the 1850s. And the population was growing so fast that housing had been reactive.

You know, there was this idea back in the Thomas More utopia in the early 1500s, and he had this wonderful image of urban settlements surrounded by green space that was picked up by the New Town movement, Ebenezer Howard and so on. The reality was, in the Industrial Revolution, all we could do was to react to a population

that was effectively out of control by building vast numbers, I mean, thousands and thousands of small back-to-back houses, industrial housing, which very quickly became slums. So if you read Engels on Manchester and Dickens, you'll, you know, Britain was, all of these industrial centres were dominated by these, by machine housing, mass-produced housing. And there was nothing utopian about it at all.

It was purely a desperate measure to house the workers to keep this population going. And of course, now, today, we're having to live with the artifacts of that because we now have vast amounts of housing stock in places that can't provide employment because in the modern world we've moved to service economy and industries in other parts of the country and traditionally i suppose you'd have shut down stoke-on-trent moved over to cambridge so of course that's not an option no it's not an option and uh so we have we have what is a real housing crisis uh and uh any of the announcement this week to build a,000 prefabs, really historic moment, really historic.

Going back to the post-war moment when Beaverbrook and the announcement to build 300,000 houses urgently after the Second World War to rehouse people who had lost their houses through bombing and so on. We have reached that stage again where we have a housing crisis, a real genuine housing crisis. A whole generation who have nowhere to live, who won't have anywhere to live,

they can't afford to get their foot on the ladder. So people need to live where there's work. Otherwise, we create massive transport issues, shifting as people are migrating every day to their place of work. Well, that was a sort of totally crazy rampage through the whole of British history. I think we should do a whole series of podcasts on this subject.

It's so fascinating. But I suppose, I guess, lastly, when you wrote this mighty book, and you spent all these years thinking about it and touring and walking around the whole United Kingdom and beyond, what are the sort of big thoughts that come out of this? What do you think our geography, both physical and human, is telling us about the state of the country today and also perhaps where we're heading? Oh, Dan, that's a bit cosmic. You know, right, you caught me out.

OK, that's really tricky. I mean, I think if you look back through time, the really huge systemic changes have been to do with the earth's natural systems so the beginning of this story 12 000 years ago begins with an episode of climate change uh seven degrees centigrade 50 years unbelievable you know we're talking now about getting preparing ourselves maybe one 1.52 degrees over the next hundred years that's's pretty extreme in itself, actually. A one-degree change, as we know from the past, you know about the Little Ice Age and when the Thames froze over in the 1600s, that was probably a drop of about one degree.

We're very exposed in Britain to, for example, the Gulf Stream turning on and off. Oh, don't. It's terrifying. So it was probably the Gulf Stream turning back on in 9,700 BC that opened this thermal window that we're in now. And if Gulf Stream turns off, then we go back to a southern Alaskan climate, which is roughly where we're level with latitudinally. So, you know, so that's not said. So it is it is critically important, critically important that we address greenhouse gases. There's no question that that is, in terms of preserving our island habitat for future generations, that is number one priority. And when you were writing this book, did you, coming back almost to this central point of Britain being an island and the development of culture and ideas and our relationship with Europe,

point of Britain being an island and the development of culture and ideas and and our relationship with Europe do do you are you more likely now to think that geography is destiny at the end of this book do you know yeah I do you know that I'm I'm uh you know I'm lucky enough to be the president of the Royal Geographical Society at the moment and uh there isn't a role that for me is more important to be doing at the moment it is something that I uh it's it's a belief system for me geography um uh i i i believe that uh a subject that that informs you about people places the environment is is the is a basic foundation course for life it certainly has given me everything i've ever ever done all the work i've ever done in my life, and the whole way I look at the world, it comes from geography. I think it's a foundation course for life, but it is something that will equip future generations to deal with some really massive issues. Nearly every massive issue we read about in the news feeds today, whether it's migration, whether it's climate change, sea

level rise, urbanisationization they're all geographical stories and we need more geographical experts you know this has to be the age of the expert and uh i'm sure you'll share my frustration that for some insanely bizarre reason in the uk you're forced to choose between history and geography when you're 14 years old and then you're allowed to give up both of them at 16 yeah and they were my two best subjects. I completely shafted my own education by having to give up one of my... And I could never understand. They were always two sides of a coin.

So bring about that positive change in your illustrious position. Absolutely. Nicholas, thank you very much. Nicholas Cranon's book, The Making of the British Landscape, is out and it's brilliant. And what are you...

Do you own Twitter and Facebook or anything? How do people follow you and get in touch with you? Have you got a website? I'm a rather slack Twitterer. Okay. I ought to improve. I must do better. is out and it's brilliant and what are you on Twitter and Facebook or anything how do people follow you and get in touch over your website I'm a rather slack Twitterer I ought to improve I must do better what are you on Twitter

I haven't got a clue I'm afraid never mind look for Nicholas Gray on Twitter he's awesome I'll tweet it out now listen

we've been ignoring Facebook live just quickly before we go we've got to leave and let you get on with your life how does your work

relate to Oliver Rackman's history of the countryside Oliver Rackman we got to leave and let you get on with your life how does your work relate to Oliver Rackman's history of the countryside this is a good point so we talked about Rackman and Hoskins what are the big things that you've updated well I hesitate to say

I've updated anyone, I'm a storyteller and this is a story about the British landscape, I'm not an academic I wanted to write a clean, linear narrative, a geographical narrative from the end of the Ice Age to the present, this episode of continuous habitation. So then the man, the writer who inspired me most was Hoskins, who wrote this book, The Making of the English Landscape. Oliver Rackham wrote wonderful books about the countryside. And of course, and I've pilfered material from his books particularly to do with the wildwood but I've used thousands of sources I didn't put them

in the book but there are I've forgotten how many footnotes there were but thousands of footnotes scaffolding to allow me to make this book and I used archaeology a huge amount so this could not have been written without Britain's brilliant archaeologists. This is, if anything, a book written with the help of archaeologists. You've mentioned a few of them today. The legendary Barry Cunliffe. Absolutely, Barry Cunliffe. And Richard Bradley, a huge figure in the Mesolithic. And I was very, very inspired by his work as well.

Well, listen, thank you very much indeed. Thank you to everyone who's watching. Sorry we've had some connection problems. We've got the Wi-Fi issues here, obviously. Nicholas, thank you very much. Dan, great pleasure meeting you. See you next time. Bye-bye.

I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work on and finish. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you