Hidden Histories: A Spotter's Guide to the British Landscape

For the times when you’re driving past a lumpy, bumpy field and you wonder what made the lumps and bumps; for when you’re walking between two lines of grand trees, wondering when and why they were planted; for when you see a brown heritage sign pointing to a ‘tumulus’ but you don’t know what to look for… Entertaining and factually rigourous, Hidden Histories will help you decipher the story of Britain’s landscape through the features you can see around you.

This spotter’s guide arms the amateur explorer with the crucial information needed to ‘read’ the landscape and spot the human activities that have shaped our green and pleasant land. Photographs and diagrams point out specific details and typical examples to help the curious spotter ‘get their eye in’ and understand what they’re looking at, or looking for. Specially commissioned illustrations bring to life the processes that shaped the landscape (from medieval ploughing to Roman road building).

Stand-alone capsules explore interesting aspects of history (like the Highland Clearances or the coming of Christianity), and text boxes provide definitions of jargon or handy references as required (like a glossary of what different field names mean). Each chapter culminates in a checklist of key details to look for, other things it might be, and gives details of where to find some of the best examples in Britain.

Author Biography

Mary-Ann Ochota is a broadcaster and anthropologist who gained her MA from Emmanuel College, Cambridge University in 2002. She is a reporter on Channel 4’s Unreported World documentary strand, has presented on Time Team, and also programmes on ITV (including on Britain’s Secret Treasures, for which she wrote the tie-in book), BBC4, BBC3, Discovery, Animal Planet and is a regular guest on Sky News newspaper review.