Pootler

  West Stow. A Recreation of a Saxon village. This post will  (I hope)  complete my effort to track the changes in the landscape and population of this sceptred isle. In fact it isn't clear that the landscape changed much over the first few centuries after the Romans left. But for continuity I have to cover who it was that 'wasn't doing much'. In future posts, covering  the  Middle Ages and beyond,  I will adhere more strictly to the theme of the evolution of the landscape . These are the Dark Ages, not because they were particularly gloomy, but because we don't know much about them, filling the gaps by superimposing our current notions on how things are organised around kings, nations and regular armies. The reality was almost certainly more chaotic.  It  might be better to think of early England as being a bit like the Congo, with weak or non-existent central control and people with strong family and tribal loyalties. There would probably have b...

Must Farm  The last post saw the rise and fall of England's last Stone Age populations. In the same way as they had replaced the earlier population, they were replaced by lighter-skinned settlers originating from the Caucasian Steppe; people who used bronze tools and kept horses and cattle. The  changes on the ground were gradual but eventually profound, and the  region might have got its first blond, as well as one of the earliest flavours of the Indo-European group of languages which predominate today.  One of their villages has been unearthed in Norfolk and tells us a lot about them. See (Link)  Must Farm  .   I f you are interested in pre-history, you could also check out (Link)  Flag Fen where there is an exhibition of what has been found. As before, the huts look very similar to those I have seen in many parts of Africa.  These people added the Sarsens to the already ancient monuments at Stonehenge, the King's Men to the Rollright ...

  In the last post, I covered the arrival of people from the start to the time at which the hunter-gatherers seem to have been elbowed out of the picture. For you lovers of jargon, that is the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods.  I tend to believe everything from Hollywood so m y take on it is a simple progression from Raquel Welch, in her fetching furs in the film 'One Million Years B.C', to the urban Stone Age sophistication of the Flintstones.  These 'Neolithic' incomers were our first farmers and the first humans to have any real effect on the landscape. They took their time getting here; farming is thought to have originated in the East some 6000 years earlier and edged in our direction at less than a mile a year. Farming can support more people than hunter-gathering, so the headcount grew rapidly. W hile their predecessors adjusted their lives to survive in the landscape they found, the newcomers  shaped it to suit their needs. T his was the start of the clear...

  I have avoided the human story in the blog so far because there wasn't one  until around a million years ago. And I will not labour over it now because there isn't much to see. The visible impact of our species of  homo, who we laughingly call 'sapiens' or 'wise', has only been recent. Notwithstanding, for the sake of the narrative,  I want to tip my cap to our more direct predecessors, who,  one day around 5000 years ago, got to work doing a bit of landscape gardening and monument building,   Summary first, then a tad more detail for the interested.   Britain was still very much connected to Europe when early human hunter-gatherers arrived around 900,000 years ago. It wasn't a permanent stay; the country was virtually uninhabitable for long periods during the ice-ages. During the warmer breaks the ice melted, the sea levels rose and those connections to Europe shrank.  Neanderthals appeared around 400,000 years ago. They are an under-...