Changing Britain: Stone Age to the Saxon Conquest

It is an obvious truth that the whole being of a nation must depend on the relationship of its people to their land. The people with a physical and spiritual inheritance left to them by their history, and the land which has been created for them by all the events of geological time and the efforts of their ancestors during the. past few thousand years. It is an obvious truth, yet one from which nowadays we shield ourselves by living within layers of wallpaper, plaster, brick and glass—these houses themselves usually deeply embedded within the man-made world of a city. Even now from time to time the bare reality of the dependence breaks through these defences. Perhaps an industry dies and we have to accept the problems of a derelict area; perhaps the destructive activities of opencast mining become so outrageous in their shortsightedness that we are roused to protect the countryside.