Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The little churches of Ashingdon and Thundersley both stand on hilltops and both look out over the strange landscape of South Essex curious juxtaposition of Iron Age hedges and roads medieval marshland and the plotland and suburbia of the twentieth century. Both churches have ancient timber structures and are witnesses to the ingenuity of early-medieval carpenters and to the trees of that period. The name Thundersley reminds us of a more distant time when men worshipped Thunder in groves. Some of the groves of that mysterious age between Roman and Anglo- Saxon England may still exist arnong the 47 ancient woods lying between Thundersley and Ashingdon churches which are the subject of this book (Fig. 2). The woods of the Rochford Peninsula are to some extent a microcosm of English woodland history. They illustrate the subtle way in which woods are an integral part of human civilization and yet have a life of their own independent of what men do to them. But all ancient woods are different and these tell their own particular story. They are not remnants of much vaster woods of earlier centuries but are between a third and a half of all the woodland that S.E. Essex has had in historic times. The landscape of south-east Essex was laid out by sorne mighty country planner in about the time of Julius Caesar For two thousand years it was a quiet corner and escaped most of the movements and fashions that changed much of England. We find little evidence of the making of open-fields in Anglo-Saxon times or of the Enclosure Acts thar unnade them of deserted medieval villages landscape parks or great estates. Ours was not a region of much wealth or poverty but of middle-sized farmers tilling their Iron Age fields for century after century. (LL)