Book review: The Making of the British Landscape

Francis Pryor doesn't like determinist theories of history. It is not, in the end, weather, soils, genes or geography that have formed his country. It is groups of individuals, and their endless, repeated decisions. "Landscapes are shaped," he says, a gauntlet thrown down to the Marxists and the materialists, "by the cultural preferences of the human societies who lived there." You might think that Britain has been moulded by its climate, or its island condition, or its natural resources. Not for Pryor, a striding late Victorian figure, the archaeologist-farmer-scholar who clearly loves this country in the marrow of his bones. Landscapes for him are dreams, fossilised visions, moments of ambition, enterprise and nurture, caught in time like flies in amber.

It is a deeply empathetic view and as a result this huge and magisterial history of the British landscape, which dares to embrace the big sweep of everywhere over the whole of time, turns out to be utterly accessible, a chronicle of foible and failure, family and fortune, the unwritten account of ordinary men and women, recorded only in the forms of the land itself.

Fifty-five years ago, WG Hoskins published The Making of the English Landscape and at a single blow created a new way of looking at the world. No-one before, extraordinarily, had understood that a landscape was an account of its own past. Hoskins invented a subject and it has ballooned in the intervening decades. Thousands of volumes of archaeology and archival research have emerged since, and in this book Pryor at last draws them into one enticing new whole.

Like any great synthesiser, he likes to slaughter a few sacred cows: at the height of the busy Bronze Age there were up to five times more stone circles in Britain than there are villages today; for mainland Roman Europe, the Druids were a kind of al-Qaeda and Britain a kind of Afghanistan, a reservoir of weirdness and religious turbulence; the Dark Ages were more energetic, populous and civilised than Britain had been under the Romans (in some places anyway); medieval England was emptier than Roman Britain; the Norfolk Broads are Danish; there is no more revolutionary period in English history than 1350-1550; the Cerne Abbas giant is a work of the not usually very phallophiliac 17th century; the Enclosure Movement was not a brutal imposition from the outside but a set of agreements between locals; the Industrial Revolution was the product not of coal and iron ore – you can get them anywhere – but of a British frame of mind which encouraged tolerance, experiment and ambition; and Victorian church restorers are to be loved and admired because they saved what would otherwise have crumbled into the earth.

It is a roller-coaster across 100 centuries, easily as at home in the wordlessness of pre-history as in the document-rich more recent past. But throughout, and emerging in blazing anger in a final chapter, is his outrage against one particular form of modern destruction: industrialised agriculture. The modern scale of agricultural destruction is appalling, the great half-noticed act of vandalism that has been carried out over the past 40 years. "Large parts of the British landscape," Pryor says, "are under actual threat of destruction. The very survival of the physical evidence for the past in particular regions, such as wetlands and arable lands, is at stake, largely due to intensive farming, peat or gravel extraction."

He thinks that in 50 years' time, no-one will be able to write a book like this. The "evidence gleaned from our surroundings" will have gone. "What tanks, bombs and guns could not destroy, modern farming has effectively obliterated in just four decades." We are staring at the possibility that in a matter of years this country will have become "archaeologically barren". Vast areas of it already are. And if a landscape is the most faithful record of a culture, what does that say about ours? Do we worship oblivion?