The Hills Have Eyes

Is the Buckinghamshire countryside tame commuter belt or wild border-country? It depends when you visit.

Eleanor Parker | Published in History Today Volume 72 Issue 1 January 2022

Excavation of the Taplow burial mound, 19th century © The Trustees of the British Museum.

You can’t plan a journey in the past, or so the train app told me. That was its polite way of informing me that (as happens pretty often) I’d accidentally put in yesterday’s date when trying to check the time of a train. Regarding trains, I’m prepared to accept that the app has a point. But of course you can plan a journey in the past, and on this particular day that wasn’t a bad description of what I was trying to do.