Francis Pryor

The Fens is Britain's most distinctive, complex, man-made and least understood landscape. Francis Pryor has lived in the Fen Country for more than 40 years and loves its levels and drains, its soaring churches and magnificent medieval buildings. Here he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation, with the story of his own discovery of it as an archaeologist.

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.