Paths to the Past

Paths to the Past

Encounters with Britain's Hidden Landscapes

Summary

Penguin Presents the audiobook edition of Paths to the Past written and read by Francis Pryor.

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily.

Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm. Scattered through fields, woods, moors, roads, tracks and towns, he reveals the stories of our physical surroundings and what they meant to the people who formed them, used them and lived in them. These landscapes, he stresses, are our common physical inheritance. If we can understand how to make them yield up their secrets, it will help us, their guardians, to maintain and shape them for future generations.

Reviews

  • Praise for Home: 'Pryor is a master storyteller... polite, informative, madly curious and at times as wide-eyed and cheeky as a schoolboy... Home is a thought-provoking discourse on the changing nature of prehistory family life [and] can be read from cover to cover like a novel'
    BBC History

About the author

Francis Pryor

Former president of the Council for British Archaeology, Dr Francis Pryor has spent over thirty years studying our prehistory. He has excavated sites as diverse as Bronze Age farms, field systems and entire Iron Age villages. He appeared frequently on TV's Time Team and is the author of The Making of the British Landscape, Seahenge, as well as Britain BC and Britain AD, both of which he adapted and presented as Channel 4 series.
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