Five journeys that take you back in time

A new book by Nicholas Crane looks at how the British landscape was formed by nature and man. Here he chooses his favourite locations

Several winters back an overladen northerly smothered Norfolk with snow, blocking roads and burying hedges. A few days into the freeze, I decided to ski to my sister’s village. In the half-light of late afternoon the undulating drifts and whorls merged with the sky and I had to use a compass to find my way.

The blizzards had been followed by an exhausted calm. Through a window in the overcast ceiling, a planet blinked. Every few minutes I paused to check my bearing and to stare into the bleak snowscape. Nothing moved and I could see no electric lights. It was as if Britain had returned to the Ice Age. Yet beneath my skis I knew there was a field where I’d once met a man with a pocketful of Roman coins he’d picked from the freshly-tilled soil. Over to my left was a rearing arête I knew to be a railway embankment from the age of steam. And ahead of me, entirely lost beneath the Arctic blanket, was a meandering stream that had been deep enough to take Iron Age trading vessels.

The village itself, Brampton, unseen in its hollow, had been named 1,000 years ago after “a farmstead where broom grows”. For one transformative evening, the ancient mosaic of human trace-marks had been wiped clean; returned to the state it had known before temperatures rose.

This Norfolk backwater is one of countless places in Britain whose past is still scored on the modern landscape. They can be found from the far north of Scotland to the tip of the West Country and they can turn a holiday or short break into a journey back through time. Here are five of my favourites.

Shetland

Two thousand years of elemental battering and it still looms resolutely above the wave-torn shore of a small island in the North Atlantic. From the water, it looks solid, like the stump of a massive column that once stood as tall as a mountain. I’d gone north by

Mousa Broch on Mousa island in the Shetlands, above