Town & Country
Travellers from an antique land
GRAVITY holds me down among mud and grass and stone, but in my mind’s eye I can hover like a kestrel above the landscape and see the patterns written on it by the ancients,’ muses Alice Roberts in the foreword to photographer David R. Abram’s extraordinary book of images of Britain’s prehistoric monuments seen from on high.
Mr Abram, who has been researching archaeological sites for some 40 years, often rose before dawn to best capture these spellbinding places, from cairns and tombs to Iron Age hill forts. His travels took him to a Pembrokeshire dolmen, Bodmin Moor, Barclodiad y Gawres on the Anglesey coast, Neolithic mine-shaft remains in Norfolk and plenty of stone circles. Many places had never before been photographed from above, such as North Yorkshire’s Thornborough henges, the sacred Priddy Nine Barrows in Somerset and a Bronze Age processional route in the Rhinog Mountains, Gwynedd (above). His aim is to show how ancient monuments fit into the landscape and how they define or respond to an area’s topography. Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain is published on September 15 (Thames & Hudson, £30).
The lady vanquishes
THE results are in—she’s done it! In the ITV documentary—which entertained some three million UK viewers with coverage of The Duchess of Cornwall taking the helm
