Visiting some of Britain’s wilder landscapes today, it can be easy to overlook the mouldering machinery of past heavy industry, and the scars incised by mineral extraction. Such abstraction must have required greater mental agility in the 18th- and 19th-century Mendip Hills, though, when Romantic poets and artists seeking rural inspiration found that the Industrial Revolution had got there first. The landscape they celebrated was one carved out by both nature and industry.

The sumptuous art at Bignor Roman villa probably also owed a debt to exploiting the landscape, although in this case it came via profits creamed off the estate’s farming surpluses. Over 200 years since this remarkable residence was discovered, many mysteries remain, including who raised it to the peak of its opulence. One thing is certain‚ the owner’s investment left the villa amongst the grandest in Roman Britain.

Excavations have recently unearthed one of the largest Bronze Age roundhouses yet found in Ireland. But rather than serving as a vehicle to showcase individual riches, the local penchant for building big is viewed as a by-product of the region’s bountiful soils.

Decidedly more cramped lodgings awaited those incarcerated in Salford’s New Bailey prison. These inmates were the lucky ones, though, as the institution was the product of a pioneering mission to promote rehabilitation over retribution. But how did the prison’s reforming zeal fare as the local population skyrocketed?

Matt Symonds