With illustrations by Elaine Jamieson.
E-book (PDF) published 2012.
The Quantock Hills, famous for their associations with Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 19th century, have been the canvas on which are sketched the shadowy images of people who lived on the land from prehistoric times to the present. There are Bronze Age cairns and burial mounds, Iron Age hillforts, Roman settlements, medieval manors and post-medieval estates, right through to stark monuments of the Second World War and the Cold War. This book presents and interprets the Quantocks landscape after a dedicated programme of archaeological fieldwork, air photograph transcription and architectural investigation by English Heritage. It describes the results in a readable book including full colour illustrations and line drawings throughout, plus a series of lively reconstruction paintings by the artist Jane Brayne.
Author(s): Hazel Riley
Publisher: English Heritage
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: XII+176
City: Swindon
Illustrations vi
Foreword by Lady Gass and Chris Edwards vii
Acknowledgements viii
Summary ix
Resumé x
Zusamenfassung xi
Introduction xii
1. A special place? The landscape of the Quantock Hills 1
Cheerful beauty: the natural landscape 1
The man-made landscape 6
The English Heritage archaeological survey of the Quantock Hills AONB 14
2. A ritual landscape? The early prehistory of the Quantock Hills 15
Handaxes and early humans in the Lower Palaeolithic period 15
The ice was all around: climate change and the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic periods 15
Hunters in the forest: the Mesolithic period 18
Landscapes of death and life in the Neolithic period 19
The Bronze Age: funerary and mundane landscapes 28
The funerary landscape: Bronze Age burial monuments 30
The mundane landscape: Bronze Age settlement 43
3. A defended landscape? The Quantock Hills in Iron Age and Roman times 51
Beyond the pale of civilisation: the Iron Age 51
Business as usual? The Roman occupation 72
4. A managed landscape? The Quantock Hills in the medieval period 77
The migration and early medieval periods: Britons and Anglo-Saxons 77
The later medieval period: lords of the manor 85
5. A Romantic landscape? The Quantock Hills in the post-medieval period 115
A changing landscape: enclosure, improvement and industry 115
Gardens bright with sinuous rills: designed landscapes on the Quantock Hills 115
A working landscape: farms, farming and industry in the Quantock Hills 127
6. A remembered landscape? The Quantock Hills in the 20th century 152
A rural idyll? The Quantock Hills in the early 20th century 152
The Second World War and the Cold War: the Quantock Hills in the later 20th century 153
A changing landscape? The historic landscape of the Quantock Hills in the 21st century 159
Appendix 1: Site gazetteer 162
Appendix 2: English Heritage Quantock project survey reports 163
References 164
Index 168
