GLOBAL WARMING and cooling are natural rhythms caused by small but complex changes in the Earth’s orbit. At the moment, helped only in part by the Industrial Revolution, things are hotting up. Current predictions for the next hundred years are a rise of less than 3C, resulting in an increase in sea level of about 3 ft. In the delta of Bangladesh alone, the lives of some 36 million people will be at risk. Indirect results will be more severe weather patterns and the penetration of salt into fresh water supplies. Drought in Sub-Saharan Africa will be commonplace. The need for water in the Middle East may eclipse land, politics and religion. Extremes of wealth and poverty will increase. World terrorism may become endemic. There are, simply, too many of us.

Twelve and a half thousand years ago, the temperature rose by 7C, and the sea level by 400 feet, in 50 years. Yet it is unlikely that many human beings drowned as a direct result. People adapted and moved. The massive global warming led to agriculture, farming, the development of writing, the building of cities (that is, civilization), and ironically the freeing for occupation of a huge land mass that is now the main polluter and threat to our fragile and overloaded human ecology: America.

In 1957, aged 22, I climbed up a steep field in Cheshire. A roofline appeared, and as more and more of the building was revealed, I believed less and less of what I saw. It was a timber framed mediæval hall of the purest form: solar and parlour, great hall, cross passage and service bay.

By 1957 it had slid down the social scale to be two agricultural tied cottages, one with a closing order on it. Together with an acre of garden it was for sale at £510. I had 8 shillings and 3 pence to my name and no source of income. I am writing this now in the buttery.

Over 46 years, scarcely a week has gone by without the house and the land revealing something obvious but unnoticed. Simply by gardening and documentary research, we can apportion every fragment of pottery that the spade has revealed to the possibility of its being used by a named individual in an uninterrupted line back to 1335. Beyond that, the names are patchy and less secure, and end with Orme the Harper and Wulfric. Yet still the pottery goes on, through Saxon, Romano-British and the Iron Age. Then come the prehistoric periods, where a single moment can change a day. And that moment never lessens its intensity.

Flint. Flint is the most sensuous and evocative of things. It is not a part of the geology of Cheshire. When flint appears in the garden, someone must have brought it, used it, left it: here. That is the first visceral kick: to be the first hand and eye to know what the flint is since it was last held, however many thousands of years ago.

The second kick is more subjective but, because of the longevity of my family’s living in this area, not entirely to be dismissed. I may be turning in my hand something made by a hand the genes of which I share.

The interconnections become more dense.

Recently, geophysics has shown that the mediæval hall occupies half of a Bronze Age round barrow. And next to it is an anomaly that respects the barrow and abuts onto it. From gardening, we may interpret that as masonry: probably a collapsed structure. For perhaps two millennia its existence was known and it was used as a quarry for building on the site. The timber hall, the latest incarnation of dwelling here, used its stone as sills to support and preserve the oak cruck framing. And one of these sill stones is decorated with carving that suggests that the stone building from which it was robbed was an Iron Age temenos or sacred shrine.

The flints move backwards. Bronze Age; Neolithic (the setting up of a farm); Mesolithic (hunter-gatherers); and the evidence from the flints is that here was a winter camp, devoted to survival, repair, preparation.

Back and back. The Mesolithic flints are the link. I look now from the buttery over an English idyll of pasture, meadow, oak, alder, brook and undulating green. Once it was different.

At the edge of the garden, cobbles have been dumped to clear the field. Others made a yard and paths. They are multicoloured and beautiful. They have been brought from the Lake District, from Ireland; they have been scooped from the bottom of the sea. The rolling fields are the slurry, the detritus of the ice: ice 1,200 feet thick.

Some of the cobbles are quite different from the others. They have the shape of flatirons: smooth underneath, with one end pointed, the other blunt. Their tops are domed, and their upper surfaces pocked as if by sandblasting. Yet not “as if”. It was sand that blasted them.

These cobbles are “ventefacts”. For hundreds of years they sat on the ground here in permafrost in a polar desert, where neither snow nor rain fell, but an endless wind blew.

The ice had gone, and into this land people returned after an absence of 12,000 years.

And so the end of the Ice Age and the start of the latest global warming began, marked in the garden by flint and pocked stone.

This sketch of one experience of the stewardship of a multifaceted yet coherent acre in Cheshire has been provoked by a remarkable book.

Steven Mithen, in After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC, has done for the world what is hinted at in the poetry of one garden. He has set out to communicate to the general reader the total effect of the end of the most recent Ice Age, and, without compromising his scholarship, he has succeeded.

He uses the literary conceit of a non-participating time traveller, who observes key events in key places at key times, which are described in detail and then analysed and interpreted for us by Mithen. The scene setting and the descriptions are vivid; but these are no televisual trivialities. For every graphic incident there is, in the end notes, the academic citation of Mithen’s sources on which his scrupulous imagination has drawn and from which he develops his arguments.

Underpinning all is a rigorous bibliography.

The result is a model for such writing, particularly when the subject is so remote from us in time, yet so pertinent to our present and our future. The lucidity of Mithen’s thought and prose will inform the professional and illuminate the general reader. After the Ice is that rare event: the right book at the right time.

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