History of the book

A Book is Born in Old Berkshire

It could be said that the book was born when the first contribution arrived. It was short, succinct and full of wisdom and love for the place where we live: that piece of old Berkshire that is now in Oxfordshire. Written by one of the oldest people in the village, it became the natural prologue to a work, which, from that moment on, had a life of its own.

The conception of the idea, long before, is much harder to place. The vision of a fully illustrated, professional work took years to develop. A small booklet telling the story of the hill in everyday language was envisaged by the village Environment Group in 1998. Involving other people was key to the work and it became a community project. Archaeology was only the start. The story of the hill had to include what had passed before it as well as what had happened upon it, both now and in the past. The cover flap of the book came to read:

Our “View from the Hill” extends from the pure, smooth chalk of the Downs across the flood plain to the river itself. We see a beautiful landscape with dramatic evidence of modern industry, farming, civilisation and conservation; but in the mind’s eye our view extends back over ten thousand years from the desolation of the last ice age through an extraordinary panoply of events, historic and prehistoric, natural and man-made, to the present day.

When cash was needed The Local Heritage Initiative actually encouraged the expansion of the plans, offering a much larger grant than was first requested. Ideas blossomed. Over two thousand photographs were taken and paintings, drawings and reconstructions were commissioned. Samples from the work of the great poets Masefield, Chesterton and Betjeman appear in the text. Masefield’s timeless poem “Up on the Downs” makes a perfect centerpiece. Our old Berkshire hill had come to symbolise everything that had passed before it over the last ten thousand years.

Peter Cockrell