The Ghosts of Chalk Country

The bestselling author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain travels the chalk downs, uncovering a glorious and unique habitat that is essential to our identity and history

No other country in the world has a landscape like the English Chalk: it’s one of a few unique habitats that England offers to humanity. This glorious countryside slopes over a million acres, from the South Downs to Stone Henge, teeming with butterflies and wildflowers of every hue. It was sculpted over thousands of years by shepherds and their flocks of grazing sheep, and our deep past still lives in this landscape, with its prehistoric barrows, burial chambers, and figures of horses and giants carved into the chalk hillsides.

Chalk is essential to English identity and history; these hills have shaped our culture from the novels of Thomas Hardy to the White Cliffs of Dover. Yet in the twentieth century vast acres of the Chalk were ploughed up and built over, and now only fragments remain.

Award-winning writer and campaigner Guy Shrubsole has travelled the length and breadth of the chalklands, mapping what the lost Chalk used to look like – and what it could look like again. For it’s not too late to restore Chalk country and reinstate this earthly paradise.