The history of Britain, an aerial view - Christopher Stanley

Britain's history has made a clear imprint on the landscape, and aerial photography demonstrated this in a particularly vivid way. This collection contains a wide variety of 150 private British aerial photographs, some specially taken for the book, brought together to represent Britain from prehistoric times to the 1980s.;Arranged chronologically, the subjects include stone circles and burial mounds (often invisible at ground level); Roman monuments; Iron Age hillforts and mediaeval castles, their military significance clearly appreciated from the air; country houses and landscapes, seen as they must have appeared in the eyes of the designers; the normally hidden traces of deserted mediaeval villages; the ground plans of Gothic cathedrals and royal palaces, raised into three-dimensional reality; the characteristic layouts of Oxford, Cambridge and Bath. Towns, villages, industry, agriculture are all shown here. Every picture is accompanied by a detailed commentary.