Not every aspect pleases

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people.

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what we are doing to it. In addition, another subject has come up in the shape of ‘man-made climate change’.

Francis Pryor is a conscientious scholar who has spent most of his life investigating the early history of the Fens. He has done important fieldwork, and by way of a professional hobby he has been a sheep-farmer, which has taught him a lot. His enormous book of 800 pages, which includes hundreds of black-and-white and colour photographs, maps and diagrams, is an updating and amplification of Hoskins, and by any standards a major addition to our grasp of the subject.

But for a book aimed at the general public it strikes me as insensitive. Pryor gives the impression that he moves in a self-contained world of experts who agree with each other on essentials and are not used to arguing their case. It begins: ‘Our story will start, as it will end, at a time of major climate change.’ And in the last section we read: ‘There can be very few people who do not by now accept the overwhelming evidence for global climate change.’