The story of how Francis Pryor created a haven for people, plants and wildlife in a remote corner of the fens.
A Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape - the Fens of southern Lincolnshire - by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England's earliest field systems. It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of ground for nature and wildlife - of repairing the damage done to a small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming.
A Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practising gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis's account of the development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the plantsman's trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally demanding plot of land.
"Whenever I travel somewhere else, in upland Britain, I find the hills and the horizon are leaning towards me, as if trying to cover me over; to blinker my gaze and stifle my imagination. It's always a huge relief to get back to the its infinite vistas of the Fens."
The Fens is Britain's most distinctive, complex, man-made and least understood landscape. Francis Pryor has lived in, excavated, farmed, walked and loved the Fen Country for more than forty years: its levels and drains, its soaring churches and magnificent medieval buildings. In The Fens, he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation the great drainage projects that created the Old and New Bedford Rivers, the Ouse Washes and Bedford Levels, the rise of prosperous towns and cities, such as King's Lynn, Cambridge, Peterborough, Boston and Lincoln with the story of his own discovery of it as an archaeologist.
"Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it." GUARDIAN
'Francis Pryor brings the magic of the Fens to life in a deeply personal and utterly enthralling way' TONY ROBINSON
Penguin Presents the audiobook edition of Paths to the Past written and read by Francis Pryor.
Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily.
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.
