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.  The predominant landscape 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 a '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....

  Brass Point nr. Beachy Head I introduced the Chalk in my previous post.  Rolling hills  of pure white stone  surround London and the Thames Valley. T he Chilterns and Downs are  '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 most of them are in England.  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.  Then as now, at the bottom of t...

Must Farm  The last post saw the rise and fall of England's last Stone Age populations. They had replaced earlier hunter-gatherer populations and were in turn replaced by lighter-skinned farmers who introduced bronze tools. You make bronze by adding a small amount of tin to copper. Both were mined in Cornwall. Handy!  It is hard to determine what actually happened. The  changes seem to have been gradual but eventually profound. They could have resulted from the incomers simply breeding more quickly, aided by a better food supply. The  region might have acquired its first blonde, as well as one of the earliest forms of the Indo-European group of languages, which predominates 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 ,  which is nearby and where some of the local archaeological finds ar...