A corner of every English field, forever foreign

The story of the English countryside is richly exotic. We’ve always known that foreigners have shaped this land: traders, settlers and, most importantly, invaders. But scratch the surface, and the detail is remarkable. Who’d have guessed that the so-called ‘Amesbury Archer’ (a 4,000-year-old corpse, found near Stonehenge) actually started life in the Alps? Or that Neolithic England was a hub of European trade? What’s more, archaeologists now think that our landscape was formed not by the Romans (as previously thought) but during the Bronze Age.Back