NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

I have just finished reading Adam Thorpe's excellent book 'On Silbury Hill'. It is much more than an introduction to Europe's largest man-made prehistoric mound - covering the theories as to how and why it was built; accounts of the archeological digs that tried to discover what (and if) anything lay within; and the personal relationship that the author (and others) has had with it. The book is also part autobiography, part gazetteer of the Wiltshire ancient sites, a quick dip into paganism/druidism, and a lament on what we have lost in our uptake of all things technological. Although I've never visited Silbury Hill, the Wiltshire downland of much of the book's setting is my ancestral home. The Gale family left the open hills and farms for London at the end of the 19th century. My father returned twice - as an evacuee and retiree - and during his latter years I visited on many occasions, getting to know the countryside surrounding All Cannings, Pewsey and...

We should each have a place where we feel that we belong - a place that is home, that feels safe, and is invested in warm and happy memories. Ordinarily these are the places of our childhood, where we did our growing, via a meandering route that was made joyful with carefree times. Although I was born in (and lived in) South London for the first three years of my life, the Hertfordshire market town of Tring was where I conciously grew up - I wrote about that period of my life here . They were good times. But at the age of 12 we moved, first to Hitchin, then a year later to Sutton in Surrey. Almost immediately my parents went through a nasty, messy divorce, so I could be forgiven for not being too enamoured with the place, or the new county that I found myself unhappily living in. But something saved that period, and it was the open spaces. One afternoon my Father took us out in the car and we spent an age driving around Surrey's southern countryside. My father (who grew up in ...