Fens

Inland from the Wash, on England's eastern cost, crisscrossed by substantial rivers and punctuated by soaring church spires, are the low-lying, marshy, and mysterious Fens. Francis Pryor has the most intimate of connections with this landscape. Formed by marine and freshwater flooding, and historically wealthy owing to the fertility of their soils, the Fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are one of the most distinctive, neglected, and extraordinary regions of England.

In The Fens, he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation--from Bronze age field systems to Iron Age hillforts; from the rise of prosperous towns For some 40 years he has dug its soils as a working archaeologist--making ground-breaking discoveries about the nature of prehistoric settlement in the area--and raising sheep in the flower-growing country between Spalding and Wisbech.