The Essay unearths the peoples of Iron Age Britain from warrior queens to Lindow Man in a major new series.

"We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free: our very remoteness in a land known only to rumour has protected us up till this day. Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open - and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks and, more deadly than these, the Romans." Tacitus, Agricola

Explore the worlds of ancient Albion; from the Western reaches of Cornwall to the tribes of Essex and across to the wilds of Scotland and Wales. Their stories, footprint and traces have been dug from the ground and pored over by archaeologists and historians and informed by the accounts of travellers and conquerors who visited the far shores of exotic Britannia for trade or glory. With the arrival of Caesar's armies nothing would be the same again.

2. Cornwall. Caradoc Peters of Plymouth University has been in love with the Iron Age past of a land and people that hovered between an ancient landscape of nature spirits and one where the living and the dead inhabited close but separate parallel worlds. It was a place of many small, fragmented communities, paradoxically at the cutting edge of new developments.

Producer: Mark Burman Show less