Fountains Abbey lies in the narrow valley of the River Skell, a few miles west of Ripon. The site holds two places, the ruined abbey and the water garden of Studley Royal. The abbey belonged to monks who came here seeking a hard and simple life and, over four centuries, became one of the richest communities in England. The garden was built by a politician who fell from power in a financial scandal and spent the rest of his life creating it.

What follows is our interpretation of what we read and learned, set down so we can carry it with us so we can review as needed as we travel across Britain.

This is a sequel to the peopling of Europe post (read it here), which told how the whole continent was built from four great waves. Britain is where those waves ran out of land, and the peoples who made it are the same ones met at the far edge of their journey, so it helps to have read that primer first. Here we will not re-explain who the hunter-gatherers or the farmers or the steppe herders were; we will follow them onto the island and say what they did once they got into Britain.

This primer crosses the threshold of writing. In most of Europe the peopling was finished before history began; in Britain the arrivals that shaped it, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Normans, all came inside recorded time, and each changed who the British are. So the full story runs past the threshold. Conflict and wars enter only as much as to explain who ended up where; the battles themselves and most of their consequences belong to the history primers.

York sits where the River Ouse meets the River Foss. The Roman army chose the spot in AD 71. The Ninth Legion built a fortress here and named it Eboracum. Danish Vikings took the town in 866 and called it Jorvik. The Normans arrived in 1068 and raised two castles of earth and timber, one on each bank of the Ouse. York Castle stood on the east bank, on the mound where Clifford’s Tower stands now. The Old Baile stood across the river on Baile Hill.

Each group built on top of the one before. The medieval wall hides older Roman, Viking and Norman defenses inside it, and the Roman headquarters lies partly under the cathedral. We spent a day walking through those layers. We started on the city wall, toured the Minster and went down beneath it, and ate lunch at the Shambles. Then we visited the Jorvik Viking Centre, the Yorkshire Museum, the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey, Clifford’s Tower and the York Castle Museum.

Rome ruled Britain for more than three centuries and built two walls across the north. Hadrian’s Wall came first and was the larger. It crossed northern England from coast to coast, with seventy three miles of stone wall, ditch, forts and towers. The Antonine Wall came about twenty years later in central Scotland. It was about half as long, at thirty seven miles. It was built of turf on a stone base, with sixteen forts. The army held it for about two decades and then withdrew to Hadrian’s Wall. UNESCO lists both as parts of one site, the Frontiers of the Roman Empire. We visited Housesteads and Vindolanda on the older wall.

Newcastle sits on the north bank of the River Tyne, near the eastern end of the line the Romans drew across Britain nineteen centuries ago. The city grew from a river crossing the Romans fortified, was rebuilt by the Normans into the “new castle” that gave it its name, and later became one of the engines of the industrial north. We came for the Hadrian’s Wall collection at the Great North Museum, and stayed for the castle the whole city is named after. The two sit a short walk apart, and they tell the same story from two ends.

Durham is a small city in the north of England, built on a steep hill inside a tight loop of the River Wear. The old centre sits on a narrow peninsula almost surrounded by water, and on the highest point of it stand two great Norman buildings facing each other across a green: the cathedral and the castle. Together they are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and together they are really one story, the church and the fortress of the same rulers. We had only one day, so we gave it to those two buildings.

Chatsworth stands in a wide green valley in the Peak District of Derbyshire, beside the River Derwent, with wooded hills rising behind it and a great cascade of water down the slope beside the house. It is one of the very few great houses still lived in by the family that built it, over four hundred and fifty years and sixteen generations of the same line.

We reached Hardwick Hall around one in the afternoon. It stands on a hilltop in Derbyshire, above the M1 motorway, and you can see it from a long way off. Six stone towers rise against the sky, and every tower is topped with the carved initials E.S., cut large enough to read from below. They stand for Elizabeth Shrewsbury, the woman who built the house.