Books on the Chilterns

R.M Robinson’s Penn Country and the Chilterns (1929) is almost a travelogue of the Chilterns with interesting nuggets of information to be gleaned from it here and there. It is particularly concerned with people and events.

J.F. Head’s book Early Man in South Buckinghamshire (1955) covers Buckinghamshire from the Chilterns down to the Thames. He concentrates mainly on prehistory, from the Stone Age or Neolithic to the Iron Age, but there are also chapters on the Roman, Saxon and medieval periods. This was written before many discoveries about prehistory in the Chilterns.

L. Hepple & A. Doggett, The Chilterns (1992) is a good book regarding the archaeology and history of the area. Prehistoric periods are dealt with quickly in the first chapter and the rest of the book divides more recent periods into a series of chapters combining a chronological and thematic approach.

K. Branigan (ed.), The Archaeology of the Chilterns: from the Ice Age to the Norman Conquest (1994) spans the whole of the Chilterns. It is a useful, and short, introduction to the type of archaeological evidence that has been unearthed in this region.

R. Holgate (ed.), Chiltern Archaeology: recent work (1995) is another book with several contributions, many refer to the Herts and Buckinghamshire sections of the Chilterns but the beds and Oxon sections also get a look in. Mostly it is concerned with the prehistoric and Roman periods, though there are a few papers on the Saxon and medieval Chilterns too.

K Branigan & R. Niblett, The Roman Chilterns (2003) mainly looks at the Romans in Hertfordshire and especially at St Albans, or Verulamium as it was known but there is a little information about the Buckinghamshire section of the Chilterns.

M. Solik New Perspectives on Chiltern Landscapes (2004), records the papers given at a Chilterns Historic Environment Conference held in 1993. Many of the papers documented recent projects and there were also some articles on interpretations of parts of the landscape of Buckinghamshire.

A map of the Chilterns can be found on the Chilterns AONB Conservation Board website.

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