Paths to the Past cover art

Paths to the Past

Encounters with Britain's Hidden Landscapes

 Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Paths to the Past

By: Francis Pryor
Narrated by: Francis Pryor
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $21.99

Buy Now for $21.99

About this listen

Penguin Presents the audiobook edition of Paths to the Past written and read by Francis Pryor.

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily.

Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm. Scattered through fields, woods, moors, roads, tracks and towns, he reveals the stories of our physical surroundings and what they meant to the people who formed them, used them and lived in them. These landscapes, he stresses, are our common physical inheritance. If we can understand how to make them yield up their secrets, it will help us, their guardians, to maintain and shape them for future generations.

 Archaeology Architecture Earth Sciences Europe Great Britain Science England Thought-Provoking

Critic Reviews

Praise for Home: 'Pryor is a master storyteller... polite, informative, madly curious and at times as wide-eyed and cheeky as a schoolboy... Home is a thought-provoking discourse on the changing nature of prehistory family life [and] can be read from cover to cover like a novel'
Under his gaze, the land starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today . . . Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it
A deeply sympathetic and practical engagement with what might have been involved in living in a prehistoric family ... Home was where the quern was
A fascinating and important story about how our ancestors lived, worked, thought, worshipped and organised themselves.
As archaeologist and broadcaster Francis Pryor explores in his excellently written, semi-autobiographical new book, the family was just as important then as it is now. By exploring what we can learn from the evidence left behind, Pryor also reveals the ways in which archaeology can tell us about "ordinary" lives ... Pryor is a hugely entertaining writer.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.