Sussex Historian Makes Fruitful Earth

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Historian Dr Alun Howkins will be the anchor for a major BBC documentary series due to be broadcast this spring. Alun, who wrote and presented the four-part series, was involved in UK-wide filming throughout the summer of 1998.

The series, which has a working title of Fruitful Earth, will be looking into the ways in which changing agricultural methods have impacted both on the environment and on social history and will cover every major period of agriculture from Neolithic subsistence farming to the huge agri-businesses of the late twentieth century.

Alun's area of research centres on the industrial revolution period, but the scope of the series required him to discuss farming as far back as 4,500 BC. "Although I wasn't on such confident ground in the period before 1770, making the programme aroused my interest in the earlier periods of agriculture much more than I thought it would," he says.

The films will run chronologically, with the first programme featuring sites in the Orkneys and County Mayo in the West of Ireland which represent the features of Neolithic farming. Other sites include Petworth in Sussex, which has an excellent example of a set of eighteenth century farm buildings, and farming areas in Cornwall, East Anglia, the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish Borders.

Despite filming in some of the most beautiful parts of the UK, Alun found the experience a tough and challenging one. "TV is full of endless re-takes and that can get so boring. It once took us eighteen takes and three and a half hours of filming to produce forty five seconds of footage. Although it was exciting and interesting a lot of the time, it was never glamourous." Perhaps next time he should try presenting the Clothes Show instead.