A corner of every English field, forever foreign

The story of the English countryside is richly exotic. We’ve always known that foreigners have shaped this land: traders, settlers and, most importantly, invaders. But scratch the surface, and the detail is remarkable. Who’d have guessed that the so-called ‘Amesbury Archer’ (a 4,000-year-old corpse, found near Stonehenge) actually started life in the Alps? Or that Neolithic England was a hub of European trade? What’s more, archaeologists now think that our landscape was formed not by the Romans (as previously thought) but during the Bronze Age.Back then, a huge, mysterious and varied population had deforested the countryside, tamed it, tilled it and made themselves rich. All the Romans did was make it theirs.

Such surprising history has left us with plenty of oddities. Surrey is now England’s most densely wooded county, and the Norfolk countryside has — over the last 200 years — emptied of people. As for all those white horses carved into hillsides (some over 3,000 years old), they’ve only survived thanks to an English fondness for debauchery; the annual ‘scouring festival’ was always an unmissable rave-up.