‘Yarg’ is simply ‘Gray’ spelled backwards, the cheese being named after the artisan cheesemakers Alan and Jenny Gray, who found a 1615 recipe for a nettle-wrapped semi-hard cheese in a book in their attic.

In the popular imagination, the Fens and other wetlands were seen as lawless places where thieves and outlaws ruled the roost and where the few small and isolated communities lived in constant fear of attack. Archaeology and local history, however, have shown that the reality was altogether different. There were some places where it was too wet to

I have spent most of my professional life working in the Fens, excavating sites in a landscape that has changed beyond recognition over the past four centuries, when wholesale drainage converted a complex network of shallow lakes, slow-flowing rivers, marshy meadows and lush willow and alder woodland into a series of huge rectangular arable fields

two large medieval churches: Peterborough’s massive twelfth-century cathedral and St Mary’s, the parish church of Whittlesey, with its soaring fifteenth-century spire.

There is some evidence that people had been extracting salt from Hallstatt in a small way since Neolithic times, but after 1200 BC the pace started to quicken; from 800 BC until about 500 BC, the mines were a major enterprise. Salt doesn’t just pickle onions and bacon. It also preserves anything in close contact with it, like the superb pieces of

There has been much stress in academic circles on the competitive nature of later prehistoric society in Britain. The rise of powerful leaders, the importance of impressive hillforts and the growing luxury of fine objects, including massive gold neck-rings (known as torcs) and even the importation of wine from the Mediterranean.h

Onions provide the basis for many modern dishes, but the large cultivated varieties originated in the Middle East and Asia and probably only reached Britain in Roman times.

nearly all the fields were entered by way of corner entranceways. Anyone who has ever tried to drive a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep from one field to another will know that the gates have to be at the corners. Put them in the middle of a long side and the animals won’t go through them: they’ll often bunch up, panic and seem to go a bit mad.

the population in Britain’s various regions had been steadily growing since the arrival of farming around 4000 BC.