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 Engrossing, occasionally outdated, and often full of joy.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]
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