Ken Follett

You know, you could have gone for a swim or gone for a walk with your girlfriend, but they decided to do something that must have seemed pretty near impossible.

Well, we're pretty sure that there were three groups of people in Britain in the Stone Age.

Some farmers.

some herders, and some woodland people that would today be called hunter-gatherers.

Now, it's generally agreed that all three types existed in Britain, and it seemed to me quite possible that all three types might exist in this region, because we've got the farmland in the river valleys, and we've got the grassland for grazing.

And if you look at Salisbury Plain, even today, there's still quite a lot of woodland there.

And that's interesting because a certain amount of drama comes out of the fact that one of these groups is doomed.

Okay?

In the world today, there are very, very few hunter-gatherers left.

This was not the best way of life.

They lasted a long time, but they have almost died out.

But then you've got the graziers, the herders, and on the other hand, the farmers.

And, you know, traditionally...

There has always been tension between farmers and graziers.

Graziers consider that the whole world is there.

The grass is there.

And so I could put my cattle there and the farmers like, I'm planting seeds on that piece of land, say the farmers.

And we all know about this because that was the real tension in the Wild West.

We've seen these movies about conflict between the ranchers and the farmers.

And I think something like that must always go on where those two groups are living close together.