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.

Jacquetta Hawkes (1910–1996) was an archaeologist and writer whose work brought scholarship, imagination and a profound feeling for landscape together. Born in Cambridge, she studied archaeology and anthropology at Newnham College and excavated in Britain, Ireland, France and Palestine. During the Second World War she entered the civil service, later serving as secretary of the UK National Commission for UNESCO. From 1949 to 1951 she was archaeological adviser to the Festival of Britain, helping shape its account of Britain’s deep past. Her books include The Archaeology of Jersey, Prehistoric Britain, Early Britain, A Land, The World of the Past and The Shell Guide to British Archaeology. Published in 1951, A Land became her best-known work, dissolving boundaries between geology, archaeology, history and literature. Hawkes was awarded an OBE in 1952. She was married first to professional archaeologist Christopher Hawkes and later to British novelist, playwright and broadcaster J. B. Priestley.Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer and journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. Her books include Thicker Than Water, Islands of Abandonment and The Savage Landscape, winner of the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. Islands of Abandonment won the John Burroughs Medal, the E. M. Forster Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.