Wandering Around Through Prehistoric Britain

The first hominins known to have walked on land which is now British appeared less than one million years ago. In  a landscape of conifers, grass and mud, a group of five adults and children left their footprints by the banks of the  ancestral river Thames. The site, recently submerged, is on the Norfolk coast. For the next eight thousand centuries,  at least four distinct species of Homo came and went, as did ice sheets and shorelines. Average temperatures rose  and fell. In 450,000 BC, a gigantic lake burst its banks and created the English Channel.

At periods in its long history of damming and release, the Channel was less of an obstacle than a snagging swamp.  Log boats and coracles of hide-bound hazel and willow are presumed to have existed. Yet in all the years from  180,000 to 60,000 BC, when Britain was once again joined to the Continent by the marshes of “Doggerland” (named  after a sandbank in the North Sea), five thousand generations of bison, reindeer, cave bear and woolly rhinoceros  roamed the chilly tundra on the edge of the habitable world without ever having to deal with humans.

In other parts of Europe towards the end of that period, gods came into being, as did the realities and concepts of  spare time, art, cosmetics, sport and humor, which existed long before “Wise Guy” Homo sapiens sapiens arrived  (after Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) on the south coast of Britain around 40,000 BC.

“I’ll tell you what the problem is—the problem is, this is a crap country.”

Geography and climate are not just matters of comfort or complaint: they determine patterns of settlement,  architecture, clothing, outlook and, in the long term, physical attributes. They create communities like the one in  which I live, where humans from different parts of Britain and, in one case, the world behave like members of a  distinct tribe.

Twenty years ago, I knew a man from “Down Under”—a term semantically similar to “Dumnonia,” the Celtic  “underworld” of Britain’s South West Peninsula. He had come from the red dust deserts of Western Australia to  England, where until the late Middle Ages the Earth was also called “the Mould” or just “Mould”: “Our time is three  score yeare and ten, that we do live on mould.” He missed the unwitnessed day-and-night-long bike rides across  the deserts and his native population density of one human per square kilometer.

Here, he had to share his square kilometer with two hundred and seventy-eight other people. When something went wrong, even if it was his own fault—boarding the wrong train or closing the front door and then remembering the key—he blamed this sodden, self-aggrandizing island outpost of humanity: “I’ll tell you what the problem is—the problem is, this is a crap country.”

For the purposes of human beings, Britain remained a “crap country” until c. 9700 BC when the Gulf Stream began  to warm these fortunate isles. From then on, there would always be a human presence in Britain. Much of it became  what most people would call liveable or even pleasant. Brain-accelerated evolution enhanced the sapient primate’s puny jaws, hands and, to a lesser extent, legs. (Wheels did not reach Britain until c. 1300 BC and the revolutionary  wheelbarrow not until the Middle Ages.)

The people of the Neolithic or New Stone Age fished and hunted, worked  wood, wore beads, warmed themselves at fires, used cooking stones and ate deer, elk, boar and shellfish under  thatched roofs. They formed relationships with dogs. They buried their dead and communicated with beings wiser and more powerful than themselves.

To Horton’s first permanent residents, it was a place where crops and children  could be raised, a home on the wide Mould to which tribal memories would be attached.

They did not stay long in one place, which reduced the need for maintenance and improvement. For four years,  we lived on the edge of Oxford under a recently made thatched roof which, by the time we left, was sagging, green  and rodent-ridden. Here, we use willow and alder to firm up muddy stretches of woodland path. In the burn, there  are flat “bakestones” but we venture to use them only as decoration.

Agriculture in non-competitive, kitchen-garden forms came from the Continent in c. 4000 BC. Only then were  permanent settlements established on British soil. The earliest known proto-villages—one in the far south, others  in the far north—date from c. 3700, which means that, in the history of civilization, the British Isles come later than  the Americas and Australia.

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The incongruously decorous village of Horton (“dirty farm” in Old English) lies in the environs of a sand-and-gravel  quarry between Windsor Castle and Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. John Milton lived at Horton in the 1630s and  evoked its prettiness in his poetry—its “aged oaks” and smoky cottages, the lawns and fallows “where the nibbling  flocks do stray,” and the “enclosure green” of Eden in Paradise Lost, set off from the “hairie” wilderness “with thicket  overgrown, grottesque and wilde.” To Horton’s first permanent residents, it was a place where crops and children  could be raised, a home on the wide Mould to which tribal memories would be attached.

In 2013, when topsoil was stripped away for gravel extraction, archaeologists discovered the ground plans of four  rectangular houses. Thatched sheds made of oak planks and posts stood there some time between 3800 and 3600 BC. The largest house was partitioned into two rooms and probably had a mezzanine floor. It measured 1,132 square  feet, making it slightly more spacious than the average detached house in Britain today. The occupants of this Neolithic housing development were not hand-to-mouth hunter-gatherers but settled inhabitants of a fertile floodplain. They made flint tools and arrowheads; they ground corn and used cooking pots. They had answers to the  problems of rainwater and rubbish. Floor-sweepings were found at what had evidently been a front door.

These proto-Hortonians were connected to the filaments of a basic trading economy. They owned one of the  must-have commodities of the fourth millennium BC—a polished greenstone axe from a cone-shaped mountain in  the inaccessible heart of the Lake District two hundred and fifty miles to the north. Langdale axes have been found  all over England and southern Scotland, with heavy concentrations in low-lying areas. For tree felling, flint was more  effective, but the axes were beautiful to touch and behold. The polished greenstone might have brought good luck  from the high fabled places which glimmered in its metamorphic sheen.

Having some experience of stonemasonry, our father recognized the work of human hands.

I was startled to discover by a simple calculation that we live within mind’s-eye distance of these outermost suburbs of British civilization. The Psalms of the fifth century BC posited seventy years as the standard length of a human life. By this measure, we of the Fossil Fuel Age are separated by only eighty-one lifetimes from the Neolithic  colonists of Horton. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia three hundred years after their houses were built. There  were cities in the Near East that were already a thousand years old.

From here on, we are dealing with relatively short periods. The entire span of documented British history covers no more than thirty lifetimes, which is why we are able to live in several ages at once without being disturbed by the  anachronism.

Though it belonged to the same period (c. 3700 BC), the first Neolithic dwelling I knew was quite unlike the detached  sheds of Horton. It lay, partially intact, in the far north of Scotland in the county of Sutherland—so named by early-medieval settlers from the Northland. In central and eastern Sutherland, there are thousands of stone “hut-circles”  on platforms cut into sloping ground for drainage and the view. These circles mark the sites of roundhouses. Some  are surrounded by miniature fields, identifiable by alignments of boulders or cairns that were heaped up when the  land was cleared of stones.

In the wandering glens and hummocky hills of eastern Sutherland, there are also mounds of stone which cover  passages leading to a sunken chamber. Some of these dwellings of the dead, dated to 3700–3000 BC, were entered  directly from an adjoining hut. Life changed so little that many remained in use well into the Ages of Bronze and Iron.

One “passage grave” in Strath Brora was probably abandoned in prehistory. Five thousand winters and countless  generations of browsing, burrowing and transhumant animals came and went, yet the tomb retained a palpable  structural coherence. Even now, it was only half hidden by turf and heather.

In the summer of AD 1971, after befriending a free-range cow and then finding nothing else to do, my sister Alison  and I, aged fourteen and thirteen, decided to investigate the bulges that were clearly visible in slanting sunlight all  over the rough pasture around our rented hovel in Strath Brora. Excavating by hand, we uncovered a cavity which  seemed to open into a narrow tunnel. “Treasure” was unlikely but there was a good chance of a bone or preferably  skull to take home as a holiday souvenir.

Having some experience of stonemasonry, our father recognized the work of human hands. He proposed a visit to  the seaside town of Dornoch, seventeen miles down the coast. At Dornoch public library, the council archaeologist  listened politely to our description and then, to my surprise, informed us that we were describing a “chambered  tomb.” These prehistoric structures, she told us, were extremely common in the area. In fact, they were so numerous,  and funding was so scarce, that only a tiny fraction had been investigated.

That night in the cottage, my mother, unusually for her, was visited by a nightmare. The local population of  prehistoric living dead had clawed and crawled its way out of its chambered graves and come to peer glumly through  the rain-streaked windows of our bleak and helpless abode. In the morning, though there was still another day or  two to run on the lease, we left the moorland mortuary and migrated in our rented Dormobile to a vast encampment  of semi-nomadic travelers and holiday-makers two miles from Dornoch on the edge of the North Sea.

Archaeologists in a distant future may struggle to explain this caravan metropolis. Arriving from the Neolithic Age,  we found its version of modernity hysterically funny. The name of the encampment was displayed in giant letters on  the gable end of an old stone cottage: “GRANNIE’S HEILAN’ HAME.”

The eponymous grandmother had died and many of her clan relatives had left the shores of ancient Caledonia and  migrated to Massachusetts. The “highland home” alluded to a popular song of the 1920s for voice and accordion. To  the plangent compressions and expansions of that lung-like instrument, the voice from “ower the sea” recalled “those  days of long ago” in the heathery highlands—“and it seems it was just yesterday.”

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Excerpted from Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History. Copyright (c) 2025 by Graham Robb. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.