Field

Available for over a year

Archaeologist Rose Ferraby travels to a field close to Fountains Abbey, in North Yorkshire. These places seem so completely natural to the landscapes we live in on these isles that they’ve almost come to represent an idea of tradition – emblematic of our green and pleasant land; but the patterns of enclosure that thread the British landscape reflect shifts in power and society over time as well as the changing ecological impacts of land use. Looking beyond the pastoral idyll, Rose sees how the different parts of field systems - boundaries, hedgerows, dung deposits and the "organic archives" of soil - offer insights into the relationships between people and the natural world. Produced by Mark Smalley A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3