Programme Information

Feature

Britain From Above
Sunday 17 August on BBC ONE and BBC TWO
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Programme copy
Press pack

Andrew Marr gets to grips with Britain's man-made landscape as the landmark documentary series, Britain From Above, continues.

In this week's programme, Andrew discovers how some of the greenest, most natural-seeming landscapes on these islands have, in fact, been shaped and moulded by human hands over the centuries. From the scars of ancient settlements to suburban splatter and sprawl, from medieval farming to farming by satellite, Man-made Britain reveals the battle between town and country and how the desire to preserve things as they are has to be balanced against the need to build more houses. It also shows how towns grow organically, how people go to extraordinary lengths to preserve our National Parks as artificial but beautiful playgrounds and how we use our landscape as the ultimate flight simulator for testing Britain's most ferocious military hardware: the Eurofighter.

Andrew says: "I hope people will learn all sorts of small, interesting facts, for example about the White Horse of Uffington and when it was made; and about how archaeologists are using lasers to look beneath the trees and undergrowth of forests to find ancient sites where you wouldn't think they could see anything. These are all things that I hadn't ever thought about."

"I had no idea about just how man-made even some of the wildest-seeming areas, from the Norfolk Broads to the Brecon Beacons, really are. I had no idea why poorer, working-class areas of cities are generally sited east of the centre. I did not know that, for 3,000 years, local people have been climbing up to the White Horse of Uffington to keep it white and clean – stopping only during the Second World War – nor that farmers are now gathering their crops using satellites to control the combine harvesters."

"Britain is a land full of local knowledge, full of world-class technical and academic expertise – full, in short, of clever people with something to share. It was a treat to hear them and I hope that comes across in tonight's programmes."

All over Britain you can find ancient, man-made structures carved and built into the landscape: Neolithic tombs, Roman roads, villas for the Romano-British gentry, enormous Celtic earthworks, and so on. Yet, from the ground, they are often only seen in isolation. From the sky, and accompanied by an expert eye, whole histories open up.

Andrew continues: "Flying over Wiltshire with Damian [Grady, aerial archaeologist for English Heritage] is a bit like playing 'I-spy' with thousands of years of history, and I'm amazed at how he manages to piece it all together. We flew over Wiltshire, a county where nearly every square inch seems to be crammed with history. Some archaeological sites cannot be seen on the ground at all but the remains lie under the soil and affect the way the crops grow. So the sites show up as patterns in the fields, known as cropmarks, which Damian reads."

Across the country, while flying over the East Anglian farmlands, Andrew gets to try his hand at sky-diving and he is amazed at what he sees: "Below me was some of the most wealthy and productive agricultural land in Britain. But it was about as natural as Birmingham.

"Practically the entire landscape below me had been turned over to food production with hundreds of pig sties, rows of chicken sheds and field after field of wheat or barley – a quarter of Britain's entire national crop is grown here. For all its beauty, East Anglia is simply a gigantic, open-air factory producing food for the nation."

As well as admiring the view from above, Andrew also takes the latest farming technology out for a test drive – behind the computer screen of a £400,000 combine harvester. "I don't know to drive a combine harvester, and I certainly couldn't steer one terribly accurately, so it's quite fortunate the newest models are guided by GPS and steer themselves. It's eerily under control," he continues. "I didn't feel like I was actually driving anything. I was just sitting there, with one hand on the trigger, as it were, and letting the satellite do the work."

During the course of the episode, Andrew uncovers a multitude of facts and figures, including:

• The latest satellite-controlled combine harvester, used on a farm in Suffolk, is the highest-capacity combine in the world. In one day, the Lexion 600 can harvest enough wheat to make over a million loaves of bread.

 

• Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is a man-made mound of chalk, built by our ancestors nearly 7,000 years ago. It is 130-feet high – the largest of its kind in Europe.

 

• The Stone Circle at Avebury – another Neolithic structure – is almost 5,000 years old.

 

• The local "folly" – a monument decorating the landscape – at Faringdon, Oxfordshire, was built by Lord Berners in 1935. It was the last folly to be built in the UK and its opening was marked by the release of hundreds of red, white and blue doves.

 

• More than 80 per cent of people live in "urban areas", despite the fact that they only account for nine per cent of the land cover.

 

• Over 15 per cent of the British Isles lies inside the protective girdle of a "green belt" surrounding our major conurbations: Wales has one, England 14, Scotland seven and Northern Ireland has a whopping 30 separate areas of green-belt land.

 

• Across Britain, over 8,000 square miles of National Park have been preserved and protected for the nation's pleasure and enjoyment. In Wales, 20 per cent of the land area is covered by its three National Parks – Snowdonia, the Pembrokeshire Coast and the Brecon Beacons.

 

• Every year, over 10.5 million people visit Snowdonia – that's four times the population of Wales. The Lake District receives over 12 million visitors in an area just 39 miles long and 30 miles across at its widest point.

 

• Sixteen million people live within an hour's drive of the Peak District.

 

• From green belt to National Park, areas of special scientific interest and places of outstanding natural beauty, more than 55 per cent of Britain's landscape is protected against developers.

 

• Local legend has it that Lord Nelson learnt to sail on Barton Broad, the largest lake in the Norfolk Broads.