CBA Landscape Booklets – more please!

The Council for British Archaeology (CBA) have recently released a free new booklet for download, providing information on ‘Prehistoric Monuments on the A1 Corridor. The PDF document covers the area between Ferrybridge and Catterick, taking in the Thornborough Henges, The Devils Arrows, and various other barrows, cursii and henges in between.

The document covers several topics, such as the Landscape Setting of the area, Types of Neolithic and Bronze Age moneuments to be seen, the Major Monuments in the area, Threats to Prehistoric Landscapes and Management of Archaeological Landscapes.

As with all new projects, there is inevitably room for improvment, and the supplied PDF is a mixture of single and double page spreads, and horizontally laid ‘portrait pages, all of which is not entirely conducive to an easy on-screen read, and we would have preferred to see a single page format used throughout for ease of printing.

But overall, this looks to be a good initiative from the CBA, providing a decent basic background to the area, on which a reasonable sightseeing trip could be based. We look forward to further documents in the series covering other major routes and groupings of monuments. Some obvious ideas which immediately come to mind:

• A20 – The Medway Monuments, Wrotham to Maidstone
• M25 – The Ancient Heathrow Landscape, West Drayton to Staines
• A303 – The Stonehenge WHS
• A35 – The Dorset barrow cemetary group, Dorchester to Bridport
• A4  – The Avebury WHS
• A44 – The Oxfordshire Stones, Woodstock to Long Compton

Which area(s) would you like to see covered in this series? Let us know in the comments and maybe the CBA will pick up on the ideas?