Forests
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LearningTranscript
00:00In America, earth is called dirt.
00:04It's the stuff you work with your hands.
00:06It's the stuff you make your living from.
00:08Landscape, though, that's different.
00:10That's the work of the mind.
00:12So forests, rivers, mountains,
00:14they aren't just chunks of raw topography.
00:17They're the way we imagine home,
00:19the home of whole nations.
00:21And my family's home was a forest.
00:23My family seemed to have had a thing about forests.
00:26My mother's people, the Steinbergs,
00:28they were Jewish lumberjacks log-rolling
00:31on the edge of the primeval forest in Lithuania
00:34at the end of the last century.
00:36At the same time, my wife's family,
00:38my mother-in-law's people,
00:40they were felling enormous redwood trees
00:42in the deep woods of northern California.
00:45So I've got good reason, personal reason,
00:48to start with forests.
00:51chickens cluck
01:05Osmanthus
01:21Enter the forest interior.
01:28Walk beneath the vaulted arches in the dimming light
01:32and you're suddenly back in a timeless place,
01:35a place where poets and painters have felt the natural processes
01:39of life and death working away,
01:42a place still haunted by myth and memory.
01:46Those myths and memories can keep us company
01:50or they can be unwelcome ghosts.
01:53In the forest, we can feel sheltered or we can feel hopelessly lost.
01:58Because the woods have been both a place of refuge and a place of terror,
02:03they've always been crowded with stories,
02:06stories that lie at the crossing of history and imagination,
02:11stories of places that have shaped the fate of nations
02:15and the minds of men, tales of saints and tyrants,
02:19wise men and fools, armies and artists,
02:22stories of extraordinary visions
02:25and memories of quite commonplace folk.
02:28MUSIC PLAYS
02:38It was a bear that Augustus P Dowd was after that spring day in 1852.
02:48It was his job, finding dinner for the men of the Union Water Company.
02:54HE SIGHS
02:58But what he collided with was a different kind of monster.
03:02300 feet high, 60 feet wide, a tree.
03:07What became known very quickly, very understandably, as the big tree.
03:14The sequoia gigantea, together with its coastal cousin,
03:18the giant redwood, the biggest living thing on the face of the earth.
03:24MUSIC PLAYS
03:27This was a collision between the onrush of modernity
03:31and the amazing, immense immobility of the big trees.
03:37After all, what could be more impatiently modern than California
03:41in the grip of the gold rush,
03:43and what could be more ancient and enduring
03:46than the millennia-old sequoias?
03:50What happened when the irresistible force of 19th-century America
03:55met the immovable object of the big trees
03:58tells us a lot about how we behave when nature gets above itself.
04:03What do we do? We put it in its place, of course.
04:07Cut it down to size.
04:20American industry, steaming along using all its hydraulic muscle,
04:25seldom saw a landscape and seldom saw a forest
04:28it didn't think would be improved by a nice, clean, clear cut.
04:50Travelling west across America,
04:52the French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville
04:55couldn't help sharing the common assumption
04:58that the bright light of progress
05:00and the darkness of great forests were mutually exclusive.
05:04When, as he put it,
05:06the vast dome of vegetation closed in over my head,
05:10Tocqueville became nervous and depressed.
05:13It took the sound of an axe echoing through the woods to cheer him up,
05:17by the sight of a rather restricted clearing.
05:20That seemed to him like a blessed oasis in an unending green desert.
05:31Not much civilisation in Yosemite in 1852, though.
05:35Just sawmills, pump engines, strip mines.
05:39But being America, even in such bleak surroundings,
05:43there was always an opening for show business.
05:47So, though the gold rush seemed to be slowing down
05:51in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada,
05:53there were enough savvy types around to smell loot,
05:57and lots of it in the big trees.
06:00An Englishman, James Mason Hutchings,
06:03became the promoter of tree tourism,
06:06boasting the glories of Yosemite in his San Francisco magazine
06:10and taking parties into the valley
06:12to admire its wonders from the balcony of his hotel.
06:16And supposing you couldn't come to the big trees,
06:18well, they could be brought to you.
06:21An ex-miner called George Gale, using some extremely heavy-duty bits,
06:26drilled holes in one of the largest, the mother of the forest,
06:31stripped off the bark and had it shipped back east.
06:35He then stitched it back together
06:38and put the whole sorry thing on show as a vegetable monster,
06:42the greatest freak of the plant world.
06:45The hollow bark even found its way across the Atlantic to England,
06:49where at least some of the public
06:51took it as yet another American tall tale.
07:01Meanwhile, back in the grove, the mother of the forest,
07:05flayed and prostrate, was expiring of her wounds.
07:09Never mind, though, the lumber, half a million feet of it,
07:13was used to build an on-site bowling alley.
07:16And on 4th July, James Mason Hutchings boasted,
07:20a party of 32 persons danced four sets of the cotillion on the stump
07:25without suffering any inconvenience whatsoever.
07:44While the story of the big trees suggests the very worst we can do
07:48to nature and to the landscape, it tells another story too,
07:52our culture's capacity for nature worship.
07:57The same frantic culture that can see a 1,000-year-old tree
08:01as nature's garage or the drive-through tree
08:04could also venerate it as a green temple.
08:14For alongside galloping capitalism and a craze for novelty,
08:19there was another strain to popular culture in Lincoln's America,
08:23every bit as important,
08:25and that was a religious sense of wonder and veneration.
08:29This solemn veneration was the feeling that Carlton Watkins,
08:33the photographer, and Albert Bierstadt, the painter,
08:36tried to project in their work the first great images
08:40of the trees presented to the American public.
08:54The trees, in fact, stopped the hustle and bustle image
08:58America had of itself dead in its tracks.
09:01What they seemed to say was,
09:03in the midst of all your obsession with the new,
09:06contemplate your antiquity.
09:11Those Europeans may have their great monuments,
09:14but we have something even older and much holier,
09:18cinnamon-brown columns,
09:20a standing holy place straight from the hand of God himself.
09:31Zealous ministers from the East reminded America
09:34that these trees were as old as the Bible itself,
09:37surely a sign that God had made his covenant
09:40with the new chosen people of the West.
09:49One newspaper man called these forests God's first temple,
09:53and it was here that the modern environmental movement was born.
09:57The great prophet of that movement, Henry David Thoreau,
10:01had once proclaimed,
10:04In wildness lies our salvation.
10:07The most passionate guardians of Yosemite and the big trees
10:11promised to make good Thoreau's commandment.
10:15This mattered so much that even in the midst
10:18of the carnage of the Civil War,
10:20President Lincoln and Congress passed a bill
10:23setting aside Yosemite for the state of California
10:26as an area to be held as a possession
10:29of the whole American people.
10:33Off-limits forever to private development.
10:36A hallowed place, a place that would bring America back
10:40to the most sacred sense of what it truly was.
11:04Of course, with every wilderness park comes its evil twin, car park,
11:10that still threatens to turn places like Yosemite
11:13into nature's garage.
11:16Places like this have been so successful
11:19at persuading 20th-century man to get away from it all
11:22that they end up importing the very same horrors they're fleeing.
11:26Automobile fumes, junk food trash,
11:30the immense empire of schlock creeping to the edge of the woods.
11:36Expanding the frontiers of reality.
11:40A dream come to life.
11:45Going even beyond imagination.
11:52Phoenix Resort Seagaya.
11:54Everything a resort should be.
12:00Already in Las Vegas and Japan, artificial rainforest,
12:05seacoasts of artificial sand, chemically filtered water,
12:09have been constructed in the interiors
12:11so that the timber from the old-growth forests
12:14actually ends up as lumber, producing struts and frames
12:18for these sanitised landscapes of convenience.
12:22So generations ahead may be fated to experience the landscape
12:27as the great indoors.
12:34For as long as we've had a shared memory,
12:37we've altered land to make landscape.
12:40All the ancient civilisations from Mesopotamia to Egypt,
12:44to China, to Greece, have interfered with rivers, denuded forests.
12:51But it's also in antiquity that just the opposite idea took form.
12:56That landscape was not simply plunder,
12:59something you snatched, cleared, ploughed, exhausted and moved on.
13:04It was also something holy, miraculous.
13:07A healer, an elixir, a temple.
13:10A place of renewal where the spirit could be nourished along with the body.
13:17It's a paradox that the same civilisations
13:20that have done their worst to slash and trash
13:23have also been most passionate about reverence and rapture
13:27in the face of nature.
13:31Here we are, then, in a tight spot
13:33between what we usually call culture and nature,
13:37as if they're always doomed to slug it out.
13:42Now, you don't need me to tell you right now
13:45it's our industrial and commercial culture
13:48that has its foot on the neck of Mother Earth.
13:51And I'm not going to pretend that the years ahead won't be critical
13:54in deciding whether our children's children
13:57will have any landscape worth the name to enjoy.
14:00But this series is not going to be one long ecological horror show.
14:05And I want to do something other than stand around
14:08wringing my hands at our fate.
14:12Rather than give you a litany of woes about what we've lost,
14:15I want to offer you an exploration of what we can still find.
14:19If we look hard enough, that is.
14:23For that's really what landscape and memory is all about.
14:27A fresh way of looking at ourselves
14:30and the ways we have imagined our landscapes.
14:35Take scale, for example, as an expression of cultural personality
14:40and you suddenly grasp the differences
14:43between expansive continental America
14:47and insular, culturally inward, economical Japan.
14:52The difference between nature to the maximum
14:55and nature miniaturised or economised.
14:59At a time when America was split in two in the Civil War
15:03but pushing its way to the Pacific,
15:05it needed something as big as a sequoia
15:08to confirm its belief in itself and its destiny.
15:12Mastery of nature in Japan, though,
15:15meant something like the opposite,
15:17the capacity to create a universe that can be contained in a pot.
15:21Mountains, rivers, forests in a few square feet.
15:27So, instead of having culture and nature square off
15:32in an endless slugging match,
15:34I'm going to try and put them back together for you,
15:36have them walk with us through space and time.
15:40And as we go on that walk, we'll see, I think,
15:43that along with everything we might truly lament
15:46in our long and complicated relationship with nature,
15:49we truly have a lot to celebrate and cherish, too.
15:55We've got to start by recognising
15:58that while the raw matter of nature may be out there,
16:03landscape is up here.
16:05It's a state of mind before it can be a state of nature.
16:10So, whether we like it or not, then,
16:12culture makes nature after its own image.
16:16Now, the surrealist painter René Magritte certainly knew this.
16:21His version of the human condition shows us
16:24that while we imagine the landscape out there
16:27as something completely independent from us,
16:30we'll actually only ever see it in here,
16:33on our side of the windowpane.
16:36That thin pane is not just our retina
16:39sending impressions to the brain,
16:41it's the mass of our whole culture,
16:43our habits, our conventions,
16:45through which we make out the lie of the land.
17:02Of all landscapes, it's the forest primeval
17:05that has caught the dark spaces of our imagination.
17:11If 19th-century America managed to see its ancient forests
17:15as a temple, for millennia,
17:17civilisations have often seen it as a graveyard,
17:21a haunted, terrifying place of disorientation and death.
17:26Classical Rome, for example,
17:29preserved the dim memory of its own origins
17:32by worshipping a fig tree,
17:34said to be the tree beneath which Romulus and Remus
17:37were sackled by the wolf.
17:39But its generals, like Julius Caesar,
17:42thought forests and the great forests
17:44to be the most beautiful places in the world,
17:47and, in fact, they were.
17:49And, in fact, they were.
17:51But its generals, like Julius Caesar,
17:54thought forests, and the great German primeval forests especially,
17:58to be a barbarous place of darkness and death.
18:07No-one really knew, Caesar wrote,
18:10just how far this ocean of leaves went,
18:13but travellers' whole armies might be swallowed up in its depths.
18:22In the year 9AD, Caesar's worst nightmare came true.
18:27Two entire legions, 25,000 men,
18:31commanded by the provincial governor of Germany,
18:34Publius Quintilius Varus,
18:36en route to winter quarters on the River Weser,
18:39found themselves trapped between swamps
18:42and the edge of the Teutoburg Forest.
18:45Led by the prince of the Cherusci tribe, Arminius,
18:49a German soldier who had reverted to German tribal loyalty,
18:53spear-wielding soldiers charged from the forests
18:56on the helplessly trapped Roman troops.
18:59For days, javelins rained down on the legions.
19:03It was a slaughter.
19:05Not just a massacre, but a disgrace so terrible
19:08that the shamed commander Varus concluded
19:11that the only decent thing to do was to fall on his sword.
19:19When the second Roman army came to the forest six years later,
19:23they found the bones of their comrades,
19:26so the historian Tacitus tells us,
19:28still lying in the place they had fallen to the German spears.
19:33Heaps of bones were piled up against little walls or trees
19:37where the Roman troops had attempted to make a stand.
19:40Other piles of bones were scattered over the fields
19:43where they had run.
19:45Bodies were still nailed to the trees
19:48where they had been sacrificed to the German gods of the forest.
19:55The blood in the Teutoburgwald
19:58stained two traditions of the forest.
20:01For the Latins, it would always be the enemy.
20:05For the Germans, it would always be the tribal home,
20:09the cradle of their nationhood.
20:19When pagan Rome became Christian Rome,
20:22it inherited this intense, ingrained horror of forest darkness.
20:28The saints and fathers of the early Church
20:31knew the woods were full of pagan abominations.
20:35Tribes who believed in gods that dwelled in oaks and beaches,
20:39even human sacrifices that hung bodies from trees
20:43in imitation of the god Wotan,
20:45had to bury himself for seven days in an ordeal of regeneration.
20:50What to do about this?
20:53Hardliners took their cue from the Old Testament
20:56that commanded the extermination of idols wherever they were found.
21:00How to do this?
21:02Uproot them, chop them down, smash, burn, incinerate the wood demons,
21:06expose the groves of idolatry
21:09to the cleansing light and air of the true faith.
21:16So, the most ardent missionaries, like St Boniface in the 8th century,
21:21had to become cunning lumberjacks for the Lord.
21:25His hagiographer tells the best story
21:28of an instantaneous conversion from pagan to Christian wood.
21:33To impress the heathens in the German province of Hesse
21:36with a display of holy muscle,
21:39Boniface was forced to make a sacrifice
21:42to cut down an ancient oak dedicated to Wotan.
21:46The usual muttering from displeased pagans broke out
21:49when an enormous bolt of lightning split the trunk
21:53into four clean pieces.
21:57What Boniface was doing was co-opting for the Christian side,
22:01the ancient Germanic tradition of the Norse and Celtic gods
22:05who put their mark on their sacred oaks with a bow.
22:09And with that masterstroke of theological grafting,
22:13the spiritually dead heathens were transformed into living believers.
22:18CHOIR SINGS
22:40The world of Christians was an arboretum of miracles.
22:44Believers could wander in their thoughts, visions and prayers
22:49from tree to tree, from tree crosses to saplings
22:53that sprouted from the loins of Jesse
22:56and climbed heavenwards like a holy beanstalk,
22:59to dry thorn bushes that suddenly became green and leafy
23:04at the moment of the crucifixion of Jesus.
23:07It was 1610 when the founding father of Dutch painting,
23:11Hendrik Goltzius, painted this extraordinary image
23:15of Christ and the Virgin.
23:17The tradition of the leafy or verdant cross
23:21was firmly planted in the Christian mind.
23:24This particular tree is surely an apple,
23:27less, I suspect, because of the popular belief
23:30that it was an apple that brought about the fall in Eden,
23:34as we find in the Song of Solomon.
23:37As the apple tree is among the trees of the wood,
23:41so is my beloved among my sons.
23:44I sat down under his shadow with great delight
23:47and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
23:50Jesus is, of course, the fruit that lies in Mary's lap.
23:55And so we are meant to see, and in this world,
23:58seeing really is believing
24:00that he is the true fruit of her immaculate womb.
24:04But he is also the fruit plucked by the flying,
24:07apple-cheeked cherub to Christ's right,
24:10whose face bears an expression of such professionally
24:13angelic sweetness that it almost convinces us
24:16that the passion was, after all, worth the pain.
24:20Suffering and redemption, the cross of death and the tree of life,
24:25all mystically entwined together in this unforgettable image.
24:46From this amazing union between the cycle of plant life
24:50and the fate of the Christian soul
24:52comes another apparition just as miraculous.
24:55Not just the death that was no death,
24:58but the stone that was no stone.
25:00Vegetable architecture.
25:06So if the church had once stood as the enemy
25:09of the pagan groves and woods,
25:11by the 15th and 16th century it had reversed itself,
25:15proclaiming their holiness by imitating their natural forms.
25:22CHOIR SINGS
25:45At the end of the 18th century, Goethe was just one of the romantics
25:49who gave ecstatic religious illumination
25:52in front of a Gothic cathedral.
25:58Multiply pierce the huge walls who raise against the sky
26:02so that they ascend like sublime, overspreading trees of God,
26:06whose thousand branches, millions of twigs and leaves,
26:10announce the beauty of the Lord their master.
26:20In the German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich's
26:23bleak and beautiful winter landscape
26:25is the true scenery of resurrection.
26:29A traveller, perhaps a pilgrim, has hobbled before the cross.
26:34He leans against the rock,
26:36that's to say against the symbol of the eternal church,
26:40and has thrown away his crutches
26:42as if some miracle had begun to heal him.
26:46The moment is the ancient winter solstice,
26:49another pagan festival of light that had been co-opted by the church.
26:53Death is present in the thick mantle of winter snow,
26:57but right in the midst of it stands the defiant emblem of resurrection,
27:02the evergreen tannenbaum, the Christian tree.
27:16The forest, of course, is not only a place
27:19which evokes the sublime or the mythic.
27:22Historically, the forest has often been an immensely practical place,
27:27and Hatfield Forest in Hertfordshire
27:29is a living relic of that utilitarian tradition.
27:33In the Middle Ages, by far the greater part of the woods
27:36consisted of trunks of trees,
27:38and in the late 19th and early 20th century
27:41In the Middle Ages, by far the greater part of the woods
27:44consisted of trunks cut repeatedly at a height just tall enough
27:48to deny the hungry deer and cattle their lunch.
27:52So the process divided the tree in half.
27:58From the high stump grew branches and sprouts
28:01that gave the woodlanders their basic working materials and their fuel,
28:05while the truncated bottom grew broad and round with the centuries.
28:12And while the result seldom recommended itself to painters or poets,
28:17it was these trees that sustained a whole world of people
28:21for whom the forest was not an alien place,
28:24either sacred or fearful, it was home.
28:42By Tudor times, the forest was being harvested for a crop
28:46that was not only useful,
28:48but which came to symbolise the very heart of England,
28:52the essence of national pride and imperial ambitions.
28:56Quercus roba, the hard, enduring, watertight, all-purpose,
29:02indomitable oak, at least 100 years old,
29:05had become what made the difference
29:07between the strong and the weak.
29:11The weak among nations and empires.
29:14Quercus roba, 2,000 of them for every man of war built,
29:18did duty in fire and flame in the great battles
29:22between England and France for supremacy of the high seas.
29:27And Nelson's own bloody victories over Napoleon's fleets
29:31would decide that supremacy for a generation.
29:42Even after the age of oak wars had ended,
29:46the memory of the floating forests
29:49loomed over Britain's sense of its historical destiny.
29:55Oak and hulls would be replaced by ironclads,
29:59sail power by steam.
30:01And in the fighting Temeraire, toad to its last birth,
30:05turned into a sea of fire,
30:07in the fighting Temeraire, toad to its last birth,
30:11Turner made his doomed veteran almost unnaturally colossal,
30:15eaten with time and battle,
30:17hauled along beneath a livid, swollen sunset.
30:22In his romantic vision, it's a floating dotard,
30:25impotent, unable to move by its own strength,
30:29forced to suffer the indignity of being toad
30:32with its hip-squeak iron tug,
30:34belching plumes of contemptuous flame and soot,
30:37its paddles churning the water before the old vessel.
30:42But the red and gold radiance isn't just an elegy,
30:45it heralds the inevitability of change.
30:50Just as new industries and new technologies
30:53thrust aside the old, new nations demanded attention,
30:58so did the grappling nations, growing from ancient roots.
31:08No painter in the history of Western art
31:11has made solitude more his subject than Caspar David Friedrich.
31:16But this French soldier, seen from the back,
31:19is surely not enjoying the romantic's favourite pastime
31:23of communing with nature.
31:25He is just plain alone.
31:27His only company is a raven on the stump,
31:30who serenades him with the bleak, morbid music ravens specialised in.
31:36While the stump itself surely stands for the German soldiers
31:40killed in the wars of liberation against Napoleon.
31:44But the German hosts are still there, aren't they?
31:48Only they have, in Germanic style, taken on the form of trees.
31:54It's the German primeval forest that faces the lone French chasseur.
32:00The Holzweg, the forest path, inviting him in to his doom.
32:05We've heard this before somewhere, haven't we?
32:08The trap of the German primeval forest
32:10about to spring on the troops of the Latin Empire.
32:25DRAMATIC MUSIC
32:35It would happen over and again,
32:38so that when, in the 1870s, a new German Reich was created,
32:43following the crushing defeat of the Second French Empire,
32:46plans were hurried forward to unveil a monument to Arminius,
32:51Hermann the German,
32:53which was thought to be the original site
32:56of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 2,000 years before.
33:01The new hero, Kaiser Wilhelm, was praised as the modern Hermann.
33:06The sword the Hermann statue brandishes was said to be Notung,
33:11the selfsame weapon torn from the ashtray
33:14by Wagner's hero Siegmund in the opera The Valkyrie.
33:18The music of the forest, hunting horns, the shout of the mort,
33:23the death of great stags and heroes,
33:26echoes all through the forest of German history
33:29and German national identity,
33:31right up to its bloody calamities of the 20th century.
33:36DRAMATIC MUSIC
33:49There was no more compulsive hunter in all modern German history
33:54than the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring...
34:00..owner of huge hunting estates, and who, in 1936, in Berlin,
34:05organised the biggest exhibition of hunting and game
34:08the world had ever seen.
34:13And it's a painful irony that, until recently,
34:17no government rivaled Hitler's Third Reich
34:20in its obsession with preserving the forest.
34:38The Führer and his henchmen liked to present themselves
34:42as outdoors woodsy types.
34:44They passed laws for the preservation of wildlife
34:47and ancient stretches of the German woods,
34:50even as their tyranny was constructing a programme
34:53of human annihilation.
34:56DRAMATIC MUSIC
35:13So when a German post-war artist like Anselm Kiefer
35:16insisted on engaging with one thing Germans of his parents'
35:20generation would rather forget, their past,
35:23he returned to the fateful path into the forest.
35:28Over and over again, he produced versions of the Hermannschlacht,
35:33the battle in the Teutoburg Forest,
35:36but with the heroic epic turned inside out as catastrophic images
35:41that are smudged, blocked and scorched.
35:44For the greatest of the series, called not Arminius, but Varus,
35:49Kiefer turned back to Friedrich Chasseur for inspiration.
35:53But instead of the romantic German furs
35:56closing in on the solitary French soldier,
35:59Kiefer created landscapes that are not immune from,
36:03but horribly scarred by history.
36:06He has blood drip into the dirty snow,
36:09the evergreens reduced to straggly vegetable deformities
36:13scratched onto the canvas.
36:20HEAVY MUSIC
36:35When the East German Communist regime crumbled in 1989,
36:39its wanton disregard for the forest heritage
36:43seemed to define its illegitimacy.
36:50While corrupt members of the party hierarchy
36:53emulated the Kaiser and Hermann Göring
36:56in annexing areas of the woods for their private hunting parties,
37:00their heavy industry, fuelled by brown coal,
37:03sentenced the great broadleaf and fir forests of Germany
37:08to death by acid rain.
37:10Waldsterben, the death of the forests,
37:13lies like a terrible epitaph
37:16on the history of Germany in the 20th century.
37:19And this time, the resurrection is very much an open question.
37:34BIRDS CHIRP
37:47Up the Niemen River,
37:49beyond the Lithuanian cities of Vilnius and Kaunas,
37:53once called Vilna and Kovno,
37:55lies the forest of my own family's memory.
38:01It's the surviving core of the last great primeval woods of Europe.
38:07At their edges, close to the rivers,
38:10the woods have been planted and harvested countless times,
38:13and there, my great-grandfather and his great-grandfather
38:17before him chopped down trees, rolled the logs to the great river
38:21and sent them on a long journey toward the Baltic ports
38:25and then outward, as far as the British Empire,
38:28to the estuarine docks of the Baltic Sea.
38:32So, while my own childhood landscape memory
38:35is of the imperial River Thames,
38:37my family album of memories returns to the forest
38:41and is popularly known as the Great Forest.
38:44It's the place where my great-grandfather and his great-grandmother
38:48were buried.
38:50It's the place where my great-grandfather and his great-grandmother
38:54were buried.
38:56It's the place where my great-grandmother and his great-grandmother
39:00were buried and is populated with ghosts of rebellions,
39:04thwarted revolutions, terrible wars, invasions,
39:08last stands beneath the trees, exterminations,
39:12kings and tyrants blasting away at the bison and elk and woodlanders,
39:18Poles, Jews, made into quarry, hunted, dispatched.
39:31Things survive, though, buried in the long memory of the woods.
39:35Sometimes, in a single barton, rusting among the ferns,
39:40the landscape surrenders, accidentally,
39:43the concise history of whole empires.
40:01Crumbling civilisations,
40:03what caused powerful empires to dramatically disappear?
40:07Riddles buried in time, science and history combine
40:11in Ancient Apocalypse on BBC iPlayer.