Notes on the Fenland; With a Description of the Shippea Man

The Fens of eastern England are unlike anywhere else in Britain: a vast, flat, mist-shrouded landscape that was once ocean floor and remains somehow otherworldly. This volume, from geologist Thomas McKenny Hughes, offers a scientific pilgrimage through this strange terrain, tracing the layers of sediment and the bones of creatures that swam where farmers now plow. Hughes maps the geological architecture of the region, the Turbiferous and Areniferous series, the slow subsidence that continues still, while reconstructing the flora, fauna, and climate of prehistoric epochs. The latter sections include Alexander Macalister's meticulous description of the Shippea Man, a skeleton pulled from the Fens that represents one of the oldest known instances of human occupation in Britain. Here is science at its most poetic: the story of a landscape still being written, and the ancient dead who bear witness to its making. For readers drawn to deep time, to the bones beneath the soil, this remains a foundational portrait of a landscape that holds England's oldest secrets.