FOR Nicholas Crane “there are few more thought-provoking spots to chew a flapjack than the edge of a ditch dug two thousand years ago by dolabra-wielding soldiers with salt on their sandals”.

This realisation came to Crane when he visited a beach that had witnessed the first onslaught of Roman invasion in 43AD. “Whether we like it or not,” he adds, “they gave us a good duffing.”

And here’s Crane on a later group of intruders: “The Vikings were good for Britain. True, they carved a wake of cleft skulls and ripped guts, and their fire and plunder relieved a culture of unknowable manuscripts and ecclesiastical treasures, but the sea-pagans also prodded a dispersed, insecure population back down the road towards urbanism.”

I quote at length because such sentences capture the tone of Crane’s splendid history of the British landscape over the past 12,000 years. When readers confront such a vast and complex subject they expect erudition from their guide, but the journey is made even more pleasurable if an author injects wit and vigour into his narrative. Crane scores highly on both counts.

Around 9700BC Britain emerged from the Ice Age and “into this waking land walked some hominids.” There had been many temporary settlers before but this epochal moment marked the beginning of continuous human habitation. Charting what happened next is a daunting undertaking but Crane provides a masterful account of how landscapes were settled and shaped, how they became the lodestones of community, security and faith, and how they helped to define countless aspects of social, economic and political life.

The book’s title inevitably brings to mind the famous 1955 study by WG Hoskins: The Making of the English Landscape. Hoskins, for all his pioneering work in local history, could be something of a Jeremiah and wrote that “every single change” in the landscape since the late nineteenth century had “either uglified it or destroyed its meaning, or both.” He sought to “contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals.” Crane is not shy about identifying modern woes – “unsightly car parks” or out-of-town shopping centres with their “low-exertion, sanitised uniformity” – but he takes a fully-rounded approach to a millennia-long tale of both successful adaptation and abject failure, of good times and bad.

We are alerted to the astonishing landscapes that have come and gone but we are not drowned in nostalgia. The loss of the wildwood was transformative, and it was no doubt a sad day when “the pelican flew no more above fenland” but the human quest to establish settlements and tame the land was also a story of struggle and ingenuity. It continues.

Crane’s book is also fully British, with Scotland and Wales sharing the spotlight with England. We travel from the towering brochs of ancient Orkney to Cornelius Vermuyden draining tens of thousands of acres of wetland north of the Wash during the seventeenth century. We discover why medieval Scottish monarchs saw the establishment of royal sheriffdoms or burghs like Dumbarton, St Andrews and Aberdeen as a means of asserting power and authority, while hearing all about the bizarre paternalistic agendas behind England’s twentieth-century new-towns: greyhound racing was to be discouraged and it was hoped that edifying “civic” cinemas would supplant all that Hollywood folderol.

It is a rare book that ranges from tsunamis in 6000BC, via the arrival of the Romans (“an army of psychopathic builders”), to John Golborne deepening and dredging the Clyde in 1770s Glasgow. Rarer yet is a volume that can make customs levies in sixteenth-century Edinburgh or the arrival of pegged mortice joints in the Middle Ages rather interesting.

As Crane admits, reconstructing lost landscapes “can sometimes demand gymnastic feats of imagination” but Crane proves to be suitably lithe and is greatly helped by his passion, his rich reserves of facts and figures, and his willingness to journey wherever the trail leads him.

“To care about a place,” Crane concludes, “you must first know its story.” Part of that crucial task involves acknowledging the collision of continuity and change. As Crane reveals, the landscapes of Britain have always been at the mercy of climate and catastrophe, while the people sustained by those landscapes have routinely veered between fleeting mastery of the natural world and periods of vulnerability.

New ideas, new peoples, and unanticipated turning points have habitually appeared when they were least expected. These days, as Crane reminds us, we know more about the landscape and how it ought to be sustained than at any time in the past. This is just as well, since the challenges that lie ahead are also of a greater, graver magnitude.

Gaining motivation from history is much more helpful than gloom, so please gobble up Crane’s wonderful account of our “chilly northern archipelago.” If you’re not too keen on urban landscapes you’ll be delighted to learn (and I was surprised, too) that, when it comes to greenery, “there is much more of it than you might think.”

“In England,” Crane reports, “89 per cent of the land area is not ‘urban.’ In Wales, the figure is 96 per cent and in Scotland, 98 per cent.” That’s a lot of days out and a lot of flapjacks to be chewed.