Pootler

     In the last post, I described the settlement of the region after the Romans left. I will now turn back to my main focus which is the creation of our rural landscape. This is very general; there is more local detail on the posts on my bike tours in the regional countryside.  Bike Tours   Landscape of Northern Home Counties  A useful but very crude simplification is that there are two 'typical' types of landscape hereabouts.  Today's predominant today, particularly in the  clay lowlands and rolling countryside to the north of London,  shown in the lighter shade in the map above, is  a 'Planned Countryside' of large and often rectangular arable fields served by a loose grid of roads. In many places, this supplanted a medieval layout known as 'Champion' landscape, which was based on open, collectively farmed fields.  The other is the 'Ancient Countryside', or 'Engliscan Gesithas' if you fancy a bit of linguistic cosplay.  Exam...

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head I introduced the Chalk in my previous post.  The hills rolling downs of pure white stone surround London and the Thames Valley. A lot of this is 'ancient' country, the bleached clean bones of old England and  Tolkien's Barrow Downs.   Wonderful stuff.  There aren’t many places in the world where pure chalk rises to the surface, and England has most of it.  If you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot and on a bike the slopes are merciful. Cretaceous Earth Its origins are described in the first two posts in my 'Deep Past' series; Links: ' From Hell to High Water '  and ' Coming Up For Air '.  A short reprise. The chalk was formed at the bottom of an ancient sea at  around the same latitude where you now find North Africa. Sharks swam in it, crabs scuttled along the bed and coiled carnivorous cephalopods called ammonites floated about.  At the bottom of the food chain, then as now, were clouds o...

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 ...