Through the stories of four fields and their surrounding countryside, Jeremy Cherfas explores our changing relationship with the land.

Dorset farmer Martin Green has spent his life excavating his fields, finding relics of the earliest farmers who worked the chalk downlands.
Producer Peter Everett

Our evolving and challenging relationship with the land is explored the rough the story of four British fields

The Field 11.00am R4 FM
These islands may be crowded with people but sufficient of the green and pleasant land survives to give the British an enduring rural tradition. This new series, presented by Jeremy Cherfas, celebrates that fact and, by taking four aspects of the role of land in our history, demonstrates how that history has changed and how we have changed with it. Today's opener features Dorset farmer Martin Green, a man who is clearly very far from the stereotype of farmers as a breed hell bent on extracting the maximum profit from the soil. Green's early ambition to be an archaeologist is satisfied by excavating his fields when he is not ploughing them and he has uncovered precious Roman and Neolithic artefacts - which he stores in a chicken shed.