Above and Below: The Battle to Save Britain's Prehistoric Art

As climate change accelerates, Britain’s prehistoric artworks are coming ever more under threat. Historian and writer Eleanor Barraclough discovers the challenges of conserving Britain’s ancient sites from the effects of global warming, from erosion by increasingly unpredictable weather, and the catastrophic effects of wildfires.

Eleanor talks to the archaeologists who are facing difficult questions about what we choose to conserve and how. She asks what these artworks are teaching us and just what we’d lose if they were destroyed. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about survival - cultural, historical, and ecological.

She begins her journey amid driving rain at one of Britain’s most enigmatic prehistoric artworks, the Uffington White Horse. Carved directly into a chalk hillside some 3000 years ago, it owes its survival to a near continuous process of re-chalking that extends back for over 100 generations. For the latest custodians of the horse, its ongoing maintenance emerges as both a physical and metaphysical act.

At Fylingdales Moor in North Yorkshire, Eleanor hunts for Bronze Age rock art amid blackened, fire-scarred ceremonial landscapes, hearing how devastating wildfires are creating urgent conservation dilemmas. On the windswept moors, time contracts and alternative imagined futures begin to reveal themselves.

Featuring contributions from Andy Foley, National Trust Area Ranger; Sarah Enticknap and Geoff Keene, Uffington White Horse volunteers; Zed the National Trust dog; Rosie Leventon, environmental artist and sculptor; Hannah Fluck, Senior National Archaeologist at the National Trust; Neil Redfern, Executive Director of the Council for British Archaeology; Miles Johnson, Head of Historic Environment for North York Moors National Park.

Presenter: Eleanor Barraclough
Producer: James Bonney
Mix: Mike Woolley
Executive Producer: Jeremy Grange
An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 4

(Image credit: John-Henry Clay)