Episode 219 - The Ridgeway: a walk through time along England's oldest road
The English Heritage Podcast
00:00
The History of the Ridgeway
Back in the day, trees would have been cut down. So this would probably have been more scrubland than massive mature broadleaf oaks or anything like that. The geology here is bright white chalk that's exposed under a very thin layer of soil. Before artificial fertilizers and modern farming methods, this just wouldn't have sustained a crop. And we don't really think about people walking and travelling with animals and kind of shifting subsistence in prehistory. But it happened all the time in Britain.
Transcript
Play full episode
