Defined by Stones: 50 extraordinary rocky places that connect our prehistoric ancestors to northern landscapes

REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is the second landscape book by Jackson to be published this year and is in many respects a prequel to his earlier Rocks on the Edge of Empire, which is itself a splendid, sometimes stunning, pictorial exploration of the interplay between the Romans, their engineering prowess, and northern England’s rocks and geology. The expected standing stones, circles, and axe-factory sites are here – Devil’s Arrows, Thornborough, Castlerigg, and Langdale – but so too are lesser known sites: Shap, Carrock Fell, a number of carbonate caves beloved and squabbled over by Victorian antiquarians, and tens of glaciated terrains, bogs, and sea shores where the human touch a