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  • Published: 1 March 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241299999
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Paths to the Past

Encounters with Britain's Hidden Landscapes




Discover the hidden corners and forgotten crevices of England's landscapes, from lost rural treasures to unseen urban gems.

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily.

Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm. Scattered through fields, woods, moors, roads, tracks and towns, he reveals the stories of our physical surroundings and what they meant to the people who formed them, used them and lived in them. These landscapes, he stresses, are our common physical inheritance. If we can understand how to make them yield up their secrets, it will help us, their guardians, to maintain and shape them for future generations.

  • Published: 1 March 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241299999
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Francis Pryor

Former president of the Council for British Archaeology, Dr Francis Pryor has spent thirty years studying the prehistory of the Fens. He has excavated sites as diverse as Bronze Age farms, field systems and entire Iron Age villages. He appears frequently on TV's Time Team and is the author of Seahenge, as well as Britain BC and Britain AD, both of which he adapted and presented as Channel 4 series.

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