841 Discovery of Britain; English Cathedrals

Travel with Rick Steves

This episode features author Graham Robb discussing his book The Discovery of Britain, An Accidental History, where he explores centuries of British history through slow travel

Key takeaways

• Graham Robb explains that 'accidental history' refers to the microscopic, often overlooked evidence of past societies found in everyday landscapes like ridge and furrow fields and canal towpaths.
• Rick Steves notes how medieval plowing patterns survive as visible ridges in Cotswold farmland, offering a direct connection to peasant labor centuries ago.

Main topics

• Slow travel and accidental history
• British landscape archaeology (ridge & furrow, Roman roads)

Notable quotes

"It's about all the little corners of history that disappear, but which collectively make up the history of a country."

Conclusion

The episode provides travelers with practical ways to engage deeply wi

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Living along the border of England and Scotland, Graham Robb has found that all you have to do is dig a little in your garden for evidence of the people who lived there in centuries past. Speaker 5 (0:10) You can just go for a very short walk in most parts of the country and find something interesting. Speaker 6 (0:16) Coming up, we'll follow Graham through the grooves and furrows of the English landscape to see how he discovers an accidental history on the island he calls home. Scattered across Britain, medieval cathedrals are a grand sight to behold. Imagine how they would have looked to the people who first stepped inside when they had just been built. Speaker 3 (0:35) The people in those days would have lived in little one-story wooden shacks, and they'd arrive and see a site like that, and it was like a preview to heaven. Speaker 4 (0:43) The whole facade would have been highly painted, highly decorated, as most of the church was. Explore the Gothic churches of England Speaker 6 (0:49) and the history beneath your feet. It's where we're going in the hour ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. Speaker 6 (1:01) We'll get you ready to see England's impressive cathedrals in a whole new light in just a bit today on Travel with Rick Steves. Two of my favorite British tour guides recommend what you should look for when visiting their picks for the most impressive Gothic cathedrals and churches in England. Let's start the hour with author Graham Robb. We've spoken with Graham in the past about the historical discoveries he's made combing the back routes of France, where evidence of long-past societies is all around you, if you know how to look for it. In his latest work, The Discovery of Britain, Graham reveals what he's noticed about the layers of past civilizations that underlie the British soil. Britain's history is laden with tales of wars and conquests, of feuding kings and rebellious peasants, innovations, upheavals. It's a vibrant history spanning from druids dancing at Stonehenge to Viking invasions to the dissolution of the monasteries and beyond. In his book, Discovery of Britain, An Accidental History, Graham Robb takes a new approach to how the island nation of Britain came to be. Woven into his take on British history are Graham's observations as he explored on foot and by bike. Through this slower, more thoughtful travel, Graham relies on geographic details to bring history to life. In his sweeping tour of the land, he follows warpaths of forgotten kings. He observes scant remains of ramparts and ponders the grassy footprints of ancient hill towns. Graham joins us now to... peel back the layers of the island nation and how it came to be. Graham, thanks so much for being here. Thanks very much for asking me, Rick. Yeah, now your book, The Discovery of Britain, An Accidental History, I like to always think of the subtitle. I know when I make a book, you have a catchy title, but then you've got to explain it a little more with a subtitle. What do you mean by an accidental history? Speaker 5 (2:56) Well, I mean that a lot of experience happens by accident. especially when you're traveling by bike. But it was also to suggest that this is not just a list of events in chronological order, although it is in chronological order. It's about all the little corners of history that disappear, but which collectively make up the history of a country. Speaker 6 (3:24) Because that's our challenge, isn't it? And I find I got a degree in history, and I always had a... challenged with Britain. I just felt like I wanted to better understand it. And you've got these conventional histories, but it's famous kings and famous battles. And you're talking about the experience of natives, nomads, invaders, and immigrants. Yeah. The mighty, the impotent, the blindingly famous, and the utterly obscure. So we know the mighty and the blindingly famous. What's a favorite example of the impotent or utterly obscure? Speaker 5 (3:59) Well, there's so much. I mean, the thing is, living in Britain, the last place I lived was Oxford. And even just scraping the ground to plant something, you find yourself in an earlier period, usually Middle Ages. But you also find Roman remains and even Celtic remains. There's this intense depth of history everywhere you go. And it's all on a microscopic level. So the thing is, there's no lack of evidence of the thoroughly obscure. But it's difficult for some writers to turn that into a history. It's much easier if you're dealing with dates of battles, kings and queens, the way they behaved and so on. And I thought it's a real shame because the direct experience you have of history when you're walking or cycling through a place. That's history too. Speaker 6 (4:57) I suppose that's one reason Samuel Pepys is so valued, because he wrote these vivid journals, right? Speaker 5 (5:03) Yeah, that's right. And he, on that literate level, ironically, there's not all that much that we know, because there's very little to compare with Pepys's diary. And if you build your history using quotations from Pepys's... well-known diary entries, you might think you're getting an accurate view of things. But Pepys himself was almost certainly unusual and eccentric, and so a lot of things he writes about, which sound quite shocking, actually were quite shocking at the time. Speaker 6 (5:35) I love the way your book was sort of born. You were on a train ride and there was a certain moment. Can you tell us about that? It's just a lovely idea. Speaker 5 (5:44) Yeah. Well, my wife, who's American, Margaret, and I, and just got back from France on a cycle tour. We only cycle and walk, we don't drive. And so there'd just been a storm, Storm Ali, which had devastated a large part of northern Britain and had cut the northern half of the country off from the other half. And a few days later, I noticed in the handy German Nazi handbook for the invasion of Britain. They said that if you destroy Carlisle Station in the west and Newcastle Station in the east, you will have severed the main arteries of Great Britain. And that's what had happened that day. By the time we got to Preston, which is in Lancashire, a long way short of our home on the border, it looked like a mass evacuation scene in a war movie. A member of the station staff came up to us and said, you mustn't tell anyone else this, but she had heard that further up the line, an engine driver was preparing to make the journey into Scotland over the high passes. And she said, if you can get there on your bicycles, you may still get home tonight. So we set off on our bicycles and a really odd thing happened as we tried to get to Lancaster Station in time before the train left. And that was that because we are looking for quieter roads, I found that we were gradually going back in time. So we're first on modern road, then on a pre-war road with its wide pavements. Then we got onto an old turnpike road from the 18th century. And it went on like this until we were on a stretch of Roman road. And finally, because of a map I'd discovered, I knew the last road up to Lancaster Station along the estuary of the Loon. was Celtic. And so we rattled onto the platform. Sure enough, there was a train there. And then the station master said, it's not going anywhere until breakfast the next day. But at that point, it didn't really seem to matter because I thought that sounds like the beginning of an adventure book or children's history. It's this perfect reverse chronological sequence. And that's Speaker 6 (8:00) where the book came from. It's a beautiful example of if you're just... tuned in to what's around you. And if you understand the context and the opportunity of digging down, and the history is, it's whispering all around you, but you've just got to slow down and take a look, I think. Author Graham Robb sheds new light on the mysteries of the past in his latest work, The Discovery of Britain in Accidental History. Graham also explains why the region where he lives along the border of England and Scotland... was home to one of the oldest and bloodiest territorial divisions in Britain. That's in his book called The Debatable Land. You'll find links to Graham's work in the notes we provide with this week's show. That's on our website at ricksteves.com slash radio. Hey, Graham, when we think about this kind of history, it occurred to me it's kind of like slow food. You know, there's a movement in Europe for slow food, and America's sort of into fast food, and we can say slow history, too. You know, a lot of people just want history for dummies. But you're taking it the other way. And in TV, we have a thing called ECU, extreme close-up. I get in trouble as the host when I start talking about these terms between the crew. But I like ECU, extreme close-up history. And when I was reading your book, it also occurred to me, history can be groovy. And I don't mean Carnaby Street and Twiggy. I mean thousand-year-old... ploughing ridge and furrow fields. Can you explain that concept of these parallel waves you can see in the fields if you know where to look? Speaker 5 (9:37) Yeah, ridge and furrow, it's the old way of ploughing. You can see it in certain lights, but you can also see much older patterns in the fields. And each landscape has a particular historical age, this particular historical age that... dominates and defines a particular landscape. When I was cycling along, I sometimes thought it'd be quite good if you could tie in your GPS unit, your bike computer, to historical maps. And instead of just showing you the miles that you had covered, it would show you which century you were in. So if you're in a part of England where you can still see ridge and furrow fields, then it would take you back to the Middle Ages and you'd know where you were. Hadrian's Speaker 6 (10:27) Wall obviously would be in Roman Speaker 5 (10:28) times. Speaker 6 (10:29) It could be like one of these fancy camera lenses where when you pointed it, it rebuilt that ruin or something. Oh, yeah, that's Speaker 5 (10:36) good. Speaker 6 (10:36) I would imagine on a bike you want to be out early in the morning when the light is just right or biking at magic hour when it's just like you can see the contours in the fields. I, for years, was driving by this field in the Cotswolds near Stanway, and I was always looking at the cricket field. But then right next to the cricket field, I realized the farmland was like corduroy. And my friend, my local friend, told me, this is echoing these, they call it fossilized remains of medieval plowing. And in the old days, all the families got a long ribbon of land, and they would just, in parallel, they would all farm it. And they plowed this for generations and generations, and to this very day it survives. And I just got covered with sightseeing, touristic goosebumps to realize that, wow, I could look at that, and if I had that proper lens, I could actually resurrect what life was like back when neighboring peasants laboring under the same landlord would be plowing their long, skinny ribbon of land. Speaker 5 (11:40) Yeah, and you also get audio. because in a lot of areas the dialect or the accent hasn't changed very much and is recognisable as the accent you see transliterated in medieval literature. So in that part of the country, in the Cotswolds, in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, you hear speech patterns and words which you can find. For example, Piers Plowman is one of the great medieval works of literature. by William Langland, who lived in Worcestershire. And he, reading that, I found it actually very easy because I grew up in Worcestershire, near the Welsh border. And reading it in the medieval English, you think, oh yeah, that's the way people talk at my local Speaker 6 (12:30) pub. That's a whole dimension of history that I've never even considered. When I look at a medieval manuscript, I say, wow, this is, even Shakespeare couldn't understand this. This is really... really quirky and old, but echoes of that actually show through in the regional dialects. Oh, yeah. Is that right? That's fascinating. Speaker 1 (12:48) How do you do, good lady? I'm Arthur, king of the Britons. Whose castle is that? King of the who? The Britons. Who are the Britons? Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king. Didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective. Graham Speaker 6 (13:03) Robb is with us today from the BBC studios in Edinburgh. Graham's time-traveling adventures have come from scouring the countryside of both Britain and France by bicycle and on foot to get up close to the land and its people so we can notice the little things that help explain centuries of history. Graham has advice to help us observe what the British countryside can tell us as we continue in just a moment on Travel with Rick Steves. Speaker 6 (13:30) We're learning how to discover what the British countryside can tell us about the people who came before and how they shaped the Britain of today with author Graham Robb. His books on 19th-century French literary giants and the people and land of France and Britain have earned him a number of important awards. Graham takes us along on his observant journeys in his latest book, The Discovery of Britain in Accidental History. Reading your book, it sort of inspires you to bring history to life, as