Francis Pryor - Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain's hidden landscapes

Francis Pryor's books have been some of the most accessible and popular guides to British landscape history. Works such as Britain BC have helped us understand how monuments like Stonehenge are actually part of a human landscape shaped by thousands of years of labour. Pryor's work with Time Team and his pioneering work as a farmer, archaeologist and historian have offered unique perspectives on history, land and society. 

Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular  sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.

Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".

On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.

These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History
Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain
Pryor - Seahenge: A Quest for Life and Death in Bronze Age Britain
Pryor - Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons
Pryor - Flag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape
Pryor - The Birth of Modern Britain
Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape