A LAND

Lying on the grass in her London garden, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes began to imagine the world beneath her: soil, rock and the immense reaches of geological time. From that sense of the land as something living, layered and inseparable from human life came A Land, her extraordinary account of the making of Britain and of the people shaped by it. Hawkes moves freely between geology, archaeology, history, art and imagination, writing about landscape not as a backdrop to human life, but as something that has formed us physically, culturally and emotionally, just as we have shaped it in return. First published in 1951, in the year of the Festival of Britain, to which Hawkes also contributed, A Land became one of the defining works of post-war writing about landscape. More than seventy years later, its sense of deep time and of the intimacy between people and place remains vivid and unusual. This new edition of Hawkes’s classic has a new introduction by Cal Flyn.