ANCIENT WONDERINGS – JOURNEYS INTO PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

I confess I wasn’t quite sure of what to make of this memoir of the British countryside and its prehistoric roots until I was some way in. The author did not have an axe to grind, a theory to popularise or that urgent, breathless energy of conquest that so many explorers impose on their journeys. What he did have – and what I was unused to reading – was an openness to experience, a humble desire to be spoken to by the past, a willingness to engage in the landscape.

His approach seems to be one of almost total immersion. He doesn’t stride about the landscape pointing at things and explaining them; he becomes part of the landscape and acts as the conduit through which it explains itself. He seems to enter an almost hermit-like existence on his travels, the kind of meditative state that can be broken by the rustle of an approaching cagoule, and often seems to be hiding from modernity as part of the process of reaching mesolithic, neolithic and bronze age souls.

Yet, it’s not just experiential; throughout this account, which ranges from Essex to South Uist and Tiree, Norfolk, Cornwall and Wessex, lie interviews with archeologists and historians behind the latest research into prehistoric Britain.

The writing can be a bit intense but, for the most part, this is a stirring account of how you can find out much in the process of immersion. Ian Vince, folklorist and historian