“The landscape around us is part of our life; it affects so much that we do and feel. Amazing forces have acted to shape our landscapes; they began millions of years back and continue to this day. Join me in a search for clues which reveal their influences on our past, present and future."

These eight programmes will take us round the British Isles in a fascinating quest for understanding the landscapes we live in. Landscape needn't just "be there", the place we live or visit simply taken for granted. Look carefully, ask around, "get your eye in" and it begins to yield up clues to its long history.

This history starts with the rocks because their nature affects the shape of the land and how we humans have had to deal with it. At the peak of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago, Scotland was under a kilometre of ice and the ice sheet almost reached the Bristol Channel. We shall explore what Britain looked like before the ice when our earliest ancestors shared the landscape with mammoths and hyenas and how Britain was tilted under the weight of ice. Now as it recovers, the Solent sinks back while Scotland rises.

We shall discover how the Bronze Age people in Ireland found gold in their rocks and how the 17th Century people in Yorkshire found alum in theirs and founded Britain's first great chemical industry, changing the landscape as they did so. In the south of England, the chalk downs yielded flint - the key raw material for Stone Age technology - and were exploited for many thousands of years. Those same downs provided a canvas for people to carve enigmatic figures - white horses and priapic giants. When were they made and what did they signify?

These are a few of the stories I'll be exploring. Our detective work involves lots of archaeology, and what I find so fascinating is that modern archaeologists use a great variety of different sciences: geology, geophysics, chemistry and biology. They add this cutting edge stuff to the old skills of meticulous excavation and clever deduction to get a picture of when and how people lived, how they interacted with the landscape and came to change it. Making these programmes has taught me a huge amount. I will never look at a landscape in the same way again and I hope you'll find the same.

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Content last updated: 25/09/2003