A Land

by Jacquetta Hawkes

The Collins Nature Library is a new series of classic British nature writing - reissues of long-lost seminal works. The titles have been chosen by one of Britain's best known and highly-acclaimed nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, who has also written new introductions that put these classics into a modern context.

A Land is Jacquetta Hawkes' seminal work, and a classic piece of British Nature writing. It is the history of the shaping of Britain and its people from the first, lifeless, Pre-Cambrian rocks to the days of the ice-cream carton and the hydrogen bomb.

First, as an archaeologist and geologist, Hawkes paints a picture of the creation of Britain from the very first forming of the earth's crust, through periods marked by lifeless worlds of rock, water and air, to the first emergence of life that senses its surroundings. The worms and trilobites mark the beginning of the story of life that evolves through the great reptiles, dinosaurs and finally humans.

This is science writing at its very best. Engrossing stories, curious facts and powerful narrative combine under the umbrella of poetic writing and unadulterated passion for the subject.

Widely lauded on its publication, this is an exposition of complex science in a way that is not just comprehensible, but also moving.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, History, Science, British Literature, Poetry, Geology

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Jacquetta Hawkes OBE FBA (5 August 1910 – 18 March 1996) was an English archaeologist and writer. She was the first woman to study the Archaeology & Anthropology degree course at the University of Cambridge. A specialist in prehistoric archaeology, she excavated Neanderthal remains at the Palaeolithic site of Mount Carmel with Yusra and Dorothy Garrod. She was a representative for the UK at UNESCO, and was curator of the "People of Britain" pavilion at the Festival of Britain.

Her second husband was J.B. Priestley.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

A wilfully personal account of Britain through geology, archaeology, architectural history, palaeontology, social history - described by its author as a memoir, her own impression of life on time, no different to the traces of a prehistoric herring in the ancient mud. I read it on holiday, with trips across Salisbury Plain to the Jurassic Coast, which was the perfect place to read it, but any tour of Britain would be the perfect place to read it - or just lying on Primrose Hill, where Hawkes opens and closes. As an added bonus, the cloth cover of this handsome edition will tend to pick up small evidences of those locations, of that closeness to the land she so loves. There's little I can say not covered in Robert Macfarlane's excellent and extensive introduction, except that in amongst his praise of her wide-ranging knowledge, he doesn't fully emphasise how funny Hawkes can be ("Carstone I will mention in order to abuse it") - she has the formidable presence of the best sort of Wodehouse aunt. Nor, in tracing her antecedents, peers and heirs, does he mention the name which seems most obvious to me - Olaf Stapledon. This does for deep time up to the present moment what he does for the distant reaches of the future, and is likewise preoccupied with humanity's grand yet at times painful duty as representatives of consciousness, a way for the universe and the land to know and perceive itself.

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable book - a sort of scientific and poetic history of deep time, from somewhere in England.

What makes it particularly interesting is the time when it was written, just after the Second World War - there is something of the imaginative exuberance of Mervyn Peake and Dylan Thomas and J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Graves and other post-war British fantasists, reacting perhaps to a time of both austerity and hope. And also that it is written from a female perspective.

The opening description of the author lying on the lawn of her London back garden, under the night sky, is quite beautiful and a little startling, particularly as it prefaces what is essentially a scientific treatise. But it prepares the reader for the book's challenging mingling of the expansive and the intimate. The science may be dated, but the book isn't.

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is lovely and poetic, but also immediate and necessary even though it is over 50 years old.

[Georgie Fay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poetic ramble through the history of the land of Britain. I loved the deep delve into geology and of course any mention of Neolithic history but found the view of our relationship with industry told from a very privileged background and I wasn’t sure of the final chapter’s conclusion or purpose! Still highly recommend!

[Simon Pockley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book by a remarkable woman. Many years ago, I had an out-of-body experience where I rose above myself and located myself in time and space while I looked down on myself. Lying on back in her garden in London, Jaquetta Hawkes locates herself in time and space by sinking through the strata of the earth and through time. All important is William Smith's principle of stratigraphy, that the strata may be identified by the fossils they contain. So attuned is Hawkes to her sense of place that this journey through rock strata becomes an act of recollection, a memoir.
When she eventually rises to the surface she examines the ways in which the qulaities of various rock strata have shaped human history and conversley the way humans have shaped the earth.

...the centre of gravity of a people in any age may be expected to be found in the objects for which they will transport great quantities of building material.

She is not a fan of concrete.

...for it represents that terrifying new phenomenon, man mechanized and living cut off from his land, from the rock out of which he has come.

Hawkes develops notions of disconnection for more than half the book. There is an intelligence residing in stability that is constantly and relentlessly under threat.

The pressure of this life was always felt on the frontiers, and when at last it began to break in it was as if unconscious forces were reasserting themselves against the intellect.

By the 1950's, when this book was published, her world, her Britain, was being laid waste by a dystopian industrial era of complete disconnection that she glimpsed.

Who can ever express the desolation of these forlorn scenes? The grey slag heaps, the acres of land littered with rusted fragments of machinery, splintered glass, tin cans, sagging festoons of barbed wire, vile buildings, more vile in ruin; grimy stretches of cement floors, shapless heaps of broken concrete. The air about them still so foul that nothing more than a few nettles and tattered thistles will grow there; not even rosebay and ragewort can hide them with a brief summer promise. This is the worst that has happened to the land.

While she calls for the restoration of a mutilated Britain, she offers no practical way forward and instead draws together the threads of her narrative, back to her garden and to her place looking out from it. I couldn't help but wonder what she would have made of the communications revolution, the loss of language, identity, and the numbing sameness of thought that permeates the world today?

[Joy Malnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jacquetta Hawkes begins her book by saying, ‘I have used the findings of the two sciences of geology and archaeology for purposes altogether unscientific. I have tried to use them evocatively, and the image I have sought to evoke is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece. (Preface) She ends with saying, "I have tried to celebrate the creation of this land and our consciousness of it. (239) She accomplished her goal in this book filled with facts about the land which are presented in a poetic manner. Her descriptions of granite, slate, gold, etc. capture their character and express the place from where they came.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A pioneering work of modern nature writing: a natural history of the author's beloved British Isles that inhabits a lush territory somewhere between science and poetry."
~~back cover

I suppose in its day (1951) it was pioneering. And it certainly isn't a straight natural history. The evolution of dinosaurs and mammals is also included, ending in a flowery, angry diatribe about the devastation that "progress" has made on the land and on the people and culture. The book is written in a style not currently favored: ornate and erudite, with hyperbole and divergences and antimacassars and aspidistras.

Aside from wholeheartedly agreeing with the author about the dangers and disasters of the modern compulsion to have a profit at the expense of the land and people, the book was ultimately boring.

[Nick Swarbrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of its time a lyrical exploration of landscape and humanity - a sort of geological Matter of Britain. But in both style and accuracy it can’t command the respect of later writers. However as a source book for those trains of thought that can be encountered in Macfarlane or Feinnes or a number of current authors it is a must-read, as it is for an example of the post-war attempt to define British cultural roots.

[Mathew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dancing between poetry and information text, Hawkes' text became an 'unconventional' bestseller when it was published in 1951 and possibly because of its very style. One could argue that it is a precursor to the swathe of idyllic nature books that are swamping bookshops at the moment. Whatever the case although much of the geological facts are dated now it is still a delight to read - one person's dreaming of and reimagining of the Earth and man's mark upon it.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique mixture of geology, archaeology, psychology, and land use analysis. I love the second half because it's less science and more analysis about man's interaction with the land. A subtle and spiritual look at the world through the interesting lens of geology.

[Lewis Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a strange little piece of nature writing

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mountains would endure to feed those roots of human nature which are starved in cities and even among cornfields. It was a hunger that began to be felt in the eighteenth century when Englishmen had won their battle against too much darkness and began to be conscious of too much light. By the end of the Palaeozoic era the possibility of Wordsworth was assured. [p. 62]

This post-war classic, published in 1951, is an account of the geology, archaeology, history and geography of Britain: 'the image I have sought to evoke is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece'. It's beautifully written, vividly imagined, and sometimes patriotic (as Robert Macfarlane writes in his introduction, 'its well-intentioned rhetoric of ‘the land’ and ‘the people’, its mobilising of a ‘blessed heritage of farmers, sailors, poets, bravely advancing into the age of radar and jet propulsion’'). 

Hawkes is good, and often very poetic, on prehistory and the shifting geology of the British Isles, and on the migrations of prehistoric people. She is perhaps less convincing when she asserts that the eighteenth century was the height of human achievement ('Only the most prejudiced can deny that the eighteenth century, and especially the reign of Queen Anne, was for all classes one of the best times to have been alive in this country.' [p. 184]) and that the Industrial Revolution was a step backwards. But she does excuse her observations on the 20th century as 'murmurings representative of a consciousness subjected to the conditions of the year A.D. 1949.' (p. 198)

This was my bedtime reading for months, and it was a pleasurable experience even when I disagreed with the author. I fell asleep with Hawkes' images in my mind: 'the three eyes of trilobites perhaps dazzled by flames and flashes while the floating colonies of graptolites were flung into the air, when volcanic energy was enough to break through the water and make a true eruption in mid-ocean' [p. 44]; of Roman statues buried beneath the earth: 'did these impassive and unseen heads remain unchanged by the mental tides flowing above them; can they be said to have been the same objects in the Dark Ages, in medieval times, in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century?' [p. 169] She pokes gentle fun at America, refers to Robert Graves' The White Goddess as history, and discusses the Bronze Age custom of burying sea-urchin fossils with the dead. Engrossing, occasionally outdated, and often full of joy.

...what could be more youthful than England in April? It has taken three thousand million years to create that youthfulness, those fierce young buds and frail eggs, greenness that seems to cry aloud, those songs in the throats of birds... [p. 37]

[Judy Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unusual! A gem. Found this in the case of a Little Free Library (Charter #2278) in Duluth, on Skyline Drive near Chester Creek. (maintained by a UMD geology professor).

"If there is one natural history book that deserves to be better known in this country, A Land is it."
"A pioneering work of modern nature writing; a natural history of the author's beloved British Isles that inhabits a lush territory somewhere between science and poetry.
Under the guise of a geological and archaeological history of Great Britain, this book is an extraordinary and brilliantly written meditation on consciousness, evolution, and art." Robert Finch

A professional archaeologist, born in 1910, living now (?) in England, Jacquetta Hawkes has conducted excavations in England, Europe, and the Middle East. Hawkes' interests have ranged beyond archaeology. She founded the British Commission for UNESCO and was governor of the British Film Institute. She is the author of many books and of plays written in collaboration with her late husband, J.B. Priestley. copyright 1951 by Jacquetta H, Beacon Press intro 1991.

Next, read this: Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier - historical fiction from Britain from the early and mid 1800's. You will recognize names and places. Very good.

[Jess Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two chapters Creation of the Mountain Country and Creation of the Lowlands were the most hard science-heavy and would have benefited greatly by the addition of some diagrams, but other than that section I found the book relatively accessible as someone with limited knowledge of geology. The bulk of the book is about how the landscape has shaped consciousness (through the climate, distribution of natural resources, habitats and terrain) and consciousness has shaped the land (first through the activities of plants and animals and then through human hunting, farming, trade, war, and industry), focusing as closely as possible on the British Isles. Hawkes particularly examines how the building materials naturally available in different areas of Britain have given rise to unique architectural styles, which sadly are being erased as cheap mass-market goods and materials are easily tranported around the country and the world. She sees the ancient creatures whose bodies formed the chalk or were embedded in the marble as contributing just as much to the built environment as the humans who shaped it.

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful if now somewhat dated look at the geological and geographical makeup of Britain by a leading archaeologist of her day. If you are British or interested in the British Isles, this is a fine and well-written introduction to the fascinating ~3000 million year history fromthe ancient Precambrian rocks of NW Scotland to the younger and softer rocks of the southeast and how the geology determines human history too.

[Kathryn Bullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing read - impossible to classify. Tells a story of the formation of Britain from earliest times, combining history, archaeology, geology and poetry. The author successfully creates a sense of place and appreciation of landscape, although sometimes her train of thought wanders off at an tangent in what she describes as her memoir style of writing. Worth a delve.

[Dan Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning and poetic way to tell the story of how a particular landscape formed over the eons. Would recommend to anyone who spends large amount of time outdoors in the landscape. Will give the reader a whole new perspective on the mountains, hills, and soil that they walk in.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but rather tedious. Went on too long.

[Chuck H · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the tradition of Rousseau, von Humboldt, Thoreau, Laxness, and others . . . a meditative exploration of our relationship with the land . . . specifically its causal bi-directionality: we change the land, and it also changes us. Hawkes succeeds in sharing her love of the UK with us, and (in my case) rekindling my own love of the UK. Written in 1949 (published in 1951), the book is barely diminished by the passage of 68 years.

[Imogen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really interesting, different book that is almost impossible to categorise. I'd classify it as nature writing, but it has a distinctly personal feel. Hawkes combines elements of geology, archeology, anthropology and history with lyrical prose to create a unique view of the natural history of Britain. To my surprise, I actually preferred the more scientific first half to the second half (which focuses on the impact of humans on the land), but there is engaging and relevant material throughout.

The Collins Nature Library edition that I read is also unfairly beautiful!

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the dedication “In memory of W.J. Turner” and that Maurice Wilson illustrated for her. Ranging through palaeontology and archaeology to building stones, there's a lot of thought-provoking themes to read about. Interesting Henry Moore artwork and black and white illustrations. I was most enthralled by the prehistory chapters, having been to some places, such as Uffington White Horse and now wanting to go back and explore more.

[Warrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and wonderfully evocative at times as well as slightly obsessive sounding at others. Some of the science of geology may have moved on, but the second half, of the towns and the cities, is so precisely right so often. The presence of Wordsworth throughout is encapsulated beautifully in the end.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult book to categorize because it is a synthesis of many disciplines. Hawkes' deep love of her native soil shines throughout as she examines how England became the nation that it is though a treatise on its geography.

[Ken]

This was originally published in 1951 but I am reading the new 2012 edition published by Collins as part of their Nature Library. It has an introduction by Robert Macfarlane .

[Tom Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

This geological history of England, Wales, and Scotland provides a kind of context for human life, and places us within the larger story of the creation of the world. I found it strangely reassuring during these strange times of ours.