My Favourite Place: Rollright Stones, Cotswold Hills
The Rollright Stones are in the area of the Cotswolds where I grew up. I lived there until I was 11 and I think that’s when you form your childhood memories. So, although we later moved as a family, for me it’s a place that’s always been my home.
This place represents perfectly what I love about the landscape and the countryside, and it’s why I formed such an interest in landscape, even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. It’s very important for children to be outdoors, as there are lots of benefits in later life. When I go back I often visit Rousham House and Garden, which is fantastic, and Blenheim Palace, which I remember going to a lot as a child.
The stones are a monolithic complex that was erected over about 2,000 years, in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. They're not huge but they’re very old. The stones are set on an escarpment, there are trees but they’re exposed and windblown.
It’s a place with a lot of character. Meadows and grazed grassland, and damper meadow near the streams; it’s typical English countryside but not too twee. Classic, rolling Cotswolds, with narrow valleys and wooded hills rising up to the horizon. I find a clump of trees at the top of a hill irresistible!
Out in the open, there’s a great expanse of space with woods and streams, it calls to you to go and explore and see what’s around the corner. When you’re there, thinking about your relationship with the environment, it makes you feel small.
The stones were erected at a point of transition between the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the adoption of agriculture. Humans started to clear ground for crops and animals, rather than moving through the landscape. The charity partner for the RHS Chelsea garden is The National Forest and the focus is on integrating forests into the community and the threats and changes that are going to come, considering our current role, and what our relationship with the landscape might be going forward.
■ www.rollrightstones.co.uk.