The first great human shockwave to strike British landscapes arrived with continental migrants in around 4050 BC. They came by boat with domesticated cattle, pigs, sheep, wheat, barley, and a tradition of building above-ground burial chambers and gigantic rectangular timber houses. 

They were also miners, excavating pits and tunnels in chalk bedrock to extract flint. The incomers were alterers of the earth: their way of life required that the land should be taken and shaped. And they did it at scale. Over the next two thousand years, Britain became stippled with earthworks and monuments that included flint mines, tombs, barrows, enclosures and henges.

Ritual landscapes evolved where a variety of monuments became connected by a belief system. 

In its vast, interconnected entirety, the complex on the River Avon was unique in its scale, spectacle and in the human resources consumed in its construction. Its initial form and successive remodelling over the centuries were British events, unifying enterprises that reflected the vision of a single island culture. For several centuries, its megalithic silhouettes were touchstones in the impermanent world of the pastoralists.

One of the more poignant sights as dusk closed over the age of the megalithic henge was the burial by wind-blown sand of the neat little stone houses close to the western shore of Orkney. The dressers filled with sand, the stone drains clogged, roofs collapsed and pastures disappeared beneath barren dunes.

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The most spectacular, final flourish from the age of giganticism can still be seen on the valley floor of the Kennet, a mile or so from Britain’s largest stone circle, at Avebury, in Wiltshire.

But around 1500 BC, gods and ancestors were usurped by the plough. In the words of the eminent pre-historian Barry Cunliffe:

'communities started to impose themselves on the landscape …to take hold of the land itself and to tame it for once and for all.’ 

Field systems spread, and as food processing became more efficient, the population grew.

The rectilinear field-banks of Dartmoor have come to be known as ‘reaves’, from an Old English word, raew, meaning ‘a row’. The field-banks may have been topped by hedges. There were ditches too, now filled with silt. People lived and worked, laughed and bickered among these patterns of piled stone. The angle of reaves relative to gradients may have been intended to create tripartite units, each with a section of valley, slope and upland. The open upland was probably grazed as a common, available to the whole community. 

By 800 BC, anxiety was being recorded in the landscape. Hilltop enclosures evolved into hillforts like Maiden Castle. At Mai Dun (it’s Celtic name translates as ‘great hill’ or ‘principal fort’), the tilted earth wall behind the ditch rose for over 25 metres at an angle that would have been all but impossible for an attacker to scale . . .Mai Dun grew to be the most spectacular of its kind, eventually accumulating three banks and two ditches, with an additional bank and ditch on its southern side and two opposing entrances which appeared to be competing for complexity. 

Calleva Atrebatum (also known as Silchester) was an oppidum, one of Britain’s earliest towns: a nucleus of population; an enclosed place of economic significance where raw materials were processed, coins struck and products made, stored and traded; the kind of place where merchants and the military could stock-up. 

By 60 BC or so, there were over a dozen major enclosed oppida in the south-east. Some oppida had a political role as a centre of local government. They were settlements with a long reach.

Unfortunately for Britain’s emerging urban culture, the island was invaded at this point by an army of psychopathic builders. 

By AD 70, a hot spring on the Avon sacred to the Celtic goddess, Sulis, had been upgraded for a Romanised clientele by the construction of a massive stone reservoir lined with lead, which provided a head of water for an adjacent suite of baths and hypocaust rooms. With time, the curative waters were rebranded Aquae Calidae, Hot Waters, although they remained better-known as Aquae Sulis, the Waters of Sulis. In an aerial view of Bath the site remains a major feature.

The legions stayed for just under 400 years. They left 500 military camps and at least 300 forts and fortresses in various states of disrepair. The island had been cut into three by a long wall and a long bank, and diced into segments by roads.

 Around 2,000 villas had been built, and perhaps as many as 100,000 other farms and rural sites. Maybe 20 or 30 of the villas were extravagant enough to be described as palatial. The largest Roman edifices were the hundred or so towns that dotted the southern part of Britain. At their peak, they may have been home to around 240,000 people, give or take 50,000.

The collapse of the Roman Empire left Britain strewn with ruins. Towns disappeared entirely from the British landscape.

Resiliant urbanisation began in 880 AD with the defended burhs of King Alfred of Wessex.

Towns proved resilient provided they were secure and had a market and space for expansion.

The ‘Gough Map’ is the most detailed cartographic description of Britain from the medieval period. It was compiled during the middle decades of the 14th century and shows an island dotted with hundreds of settlements, among them 40 walled towns. The prominence of rivers reflects their medieval significance.

By the 16th century, Britain had reached a peak of diversity. At one extreme, the city of London had swollen to a population of 75,000 and its ‘heat island effect’ was adding 4ºC to its urban temperatures. Nearly 20 times more coal was being burned in London in 1500 than in 1300.

At the other end of the island, the north west of Scotland was still prowled by wolves. In the late 1500s, the mapmaker Timothy Pont labelled it ‘Extreem Wildernes’.

The last major tracts of Britain’s wilderness disappeared in the 17th century. Led by Dutch engineers, labourers dug dykes, diverted rivers and installed wind-pumps to drain the post-glacial wetlands of eastern England. 

Draining the wetlands became part of a bigger project to extend river navigation by constructing artificial ‘cuts’ - canals - to provide freight links for the Industrial Revolution

The meanders and inefficient flash-locks of shallow river systems could be bypassed by purpose-built canals with regulated depths and no currents.

From 1757 with the opening of the 12-mile Sankey Brook Navigation in south Lancashire, a completely new system of waterways began to connect Britain’s coal fields and industrial centres...

In the 1730s there had been around 1,200 miles of navigable rivers in Britain, many of them improved. One century later, canals had extended that total to around 4,000 miles of navigable waterways.

It had been a remarkable - if partial - transformation. But canals were regional. They did not form an all-embracing system. Most of Scotland, Wales, the West Country and Pennines still lay beyond the reach of navigable waterways.

By 1830, the great age of canal construction had run its course. Steam was the new transformative force.

The world’s first twin-tracked, steam-hauled railway opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.

Edge-rails crept across England, southern Scotland and southern and northern Wales.

By 1840, London had become the most defined hub of the network and by 1852, most major towns and cities in Britain were connected, with eastern and western extensions to Glasgow and Edinburgh while a line from Gloucester ran west through the industrial south of Wales.

Over 7,000 miles of track were laid in twenty years, far outstretching the eventual 4,000-mile total for inland navigation and canals.

The idea of the planned town had been around since at least the 1500s, when Thomas More wrote of his Utopian urban hubs. But the most striking early example was the New Town planned by the Convention of Royal Burghs of Scotland in 1752.

By the 19th century, population and industry were growing too fast for Utopian town-planning to keep up. London had become the world’s largest city.

Land was being consumed as if it was an infinite resource. In the fifty years from 1801, the population of England more than doubled, from 8.3 million, to 16.9 million; the population of Wales nearly doubled, to 1.06 million; the population of Scotland had increased by 56 percent, to 2.9 million.

By 1841, the balance had tipped and Britain became more than half-urban, with 51 per cent of the population living in towns and cities.

By 1900, the population had nearly doubled again [in 50 years] and only one-fifth of people were living in what could be called ‘rural landscapes’. 

By the end of the Fifties, maps of England and Wales were marking the boundaries of national parks in the Peak District, the Lake District, Snowdonia, Dartmoor, the Pembrokeshire Coast, the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Dales, Exmoor, Northumberland and the Brecon Beacons... Rolled-out at astonishing scale and speed, the national parks were a last-ditch measure to halt the advancing diggers. Later, The Broads, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, Cairngorms, New Forest and South Downs were added to the National Park ‘family’.

The two main factors forcing landscape change are climate and humans.

Cutting emissions of greenhouse gases will reduce the risk of extreme climate change. One of the key technological measures is the switch from burning fossil fuels to the development of renewable energy.

Only 12,000 years have passed since this island was an uninhabited wilderness of ice and tundra. Today, the landscapes of Britain are the habitat of 64 million humans.

In England, 89 per cent of the land area is not ‘urban’. In Wales, the figure is 96 per cent and in Scotland, 98 per cent.

If the urban ‘green space’ is added to the countryside, the total ‘natural’ cover in England rises to 98 per cent. In Scotland and Wales, the figure is over 99 per cent.

The challenge facing the custodians of Britain’s landscapes - us - is to protect and improve the quality of our entire environment, from natural ecosystems to cities.

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