An environmental history of Great Britain: from 10,000 years ago to the present

Abstract

This is a history of the environment of England, Wales and Scotland, and of the interactions of people, place and nature since the last ice sheet withdrew some ten thousand years ago. It is concerned with the changing cultures (in the full anthropological sense) of the peoples inhabiting Britain as well as with the environment they transformed, exploited, abused and cherished. As the author points out, every culture in Britain has had to acknowledge its placement on a set of islands 50 N where any month of the year can be the wettest month of the year, where there are some long shallow estuaries and a few deep inlets, and where cereals do not reliably ripen 300 metres above sea-level. Cultural imagination cannot alter these realities, but it can variously view them as dangerous or picturesque, as economic or uneconomic. The book is a history of changing reflexivity in the interactions between people, culture, and nature. The book is structured as a chronological narrative. It is written with unusual grace, wit and clarity, and illustrated with 50 photographs and some 60 maps and diagrams, all specially prepared for this book. The author draws on a very wide range of sources and uses scientific evidence as well as the conventional historical record, as well as on his own experience of the landscapes of Britain. This is cultural and natural history at its best, with a wide appeal within and without the academy.