How do animals and plants help you to interpret the history of a landscape?
Once you get to recognise common plants and animals then they will often tell you about underlying rocks and climate - acid soils vs. base rich soils etc. The peat formations of Scotland - now a sign of cool, acid, wet conditions - often reveal remnants of past forests. Sometimes there are signs of early Bronze Age cultivation when the climate was warmer and it was possible to cultivate wheat above 1200 feet! Of course, going back further into the past, the fossil remains of plants and animals may paint a dramatic picture of landscapes we shared with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroces and spotted hyenas!

What do you take with you into a landscape to help you interpret it?
If you've read something about an area before you head out, then you'll see much more. Otherwise what you need tends to be obvious - binoculars for large things, hand lens for small - perhaps a net and jars to hold insects temporarily while you identify them. Budding geologists will need a trade-mark geological hammer - to be used only with great restraint and discretion. Of course, if you can find one, the best thing of all to take out with you is an expert on what you're interested in!

Do you ever feel you fully understand a landscape feature or are you drawn to investigate it further?
You never know the whole story do you? Sometimes you feel everything is coming together - for me, the mighty wealth and works of the monks and tenants of Glastonbury Abbey, suddenly opened my eyes to the history of the Tor, the fields, the canals, the old buildings around me. But there's always more detail and for that one must delve further into the historical documents or the pollen revealed in the peat cores and so on.

Do you sometimes find that you need historical archives, documents, cultural history to make sense of the landscape, geology and science?
Absolutely - above I've just given the example of the Glastonbury story. The wonderful thing for me about investigating landscapes is how all the great sources of knowledge, all the professional skills come together. Investigating The Long Man of Wilmington, for example. A geophysicist checks the age of a soil using Optically Stimulated Luminescence - how long since it was last exposed to light. The results are compared with those of a biologist who discovers what land snails were living in the soil at that time. An archaeologist identifies the age of pieces of pottery found at the site and an historian checks up the parish documents to find when some feature was first recorded by people living a few centuries ago. It is co-operative detective work of the very highest order!

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Content last updated: 25/09/2003