Toby Driver’s splendid book is a major contribution both to the academic study of Pembrokeshire landscapes and to public access to the archaeology and history of this beautiful part of the world. In one of an increasing number of substantial outreach publications from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW), Toby Driver’s exquisite photography graces a text that is descriptively authoritative and comprehensive in both its geographic and temporal ranges.

The book begins with an overview of the history of aerial photography as a fundamental tool of field archaeology and how this has moved now to being an essential component, in the digital age, of a suite of interlinked technologies of survey and record, which have become not just tools of research and teaching, but also of landscape management and environmental policy. This first chapter is illustrated not just by a variety of photographs engaging different techniques and environmental conditions, but also by some excellent diagrams, which demonstrate how the past can be revealed and understood. The audience clearly is both the interested lay person and the undergraduate, and so the book continues.

The next chapter is an introduction, much in the vein of a county history or the old regional volumes of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, giving us first geology and geography and then taking us through a rapid chronology of the human presence. This is very much a headline synthesis of established narratives, although acknowledging key elements of more recent research, such as Wainwright and Darvill’s Preseli work and the Roman Roads Project. It is not, however, intended to be principally analytical, nor does it aim to raise research questions and issues, although many remain to be addressed in this region.

The book then has individual chapters which lean on this chronology and examine each of six sub-regions, all inevitably on this Atlantic peninsula with a stretch of coast together with their hinterlands. For those who know Pembrokeshire, however, there is also another primary cultural topographical and political division, between the upland and Welsh-speaking north of the county and the lowland English-orientated south (‘Little England Beyond Wales’). As far as I can see, this fundamental source of long-term division and regionality is ignored in this book, despite the fact that much of the existing landscape narratives – especially the interpretation of historic period settlements – are predicated on this meta-narrative. Why this is ignored is difficult to understand, unless the intention was to avoid sources of contention and provide a homogenous and politically neutral account, as may be appropriate for a publicly funded body. The book is completed by an extended and refreshing look at how the landscape of Pembrokeshire continues to change under the human hand and takes a glimpse at what the future may hold.

None the less, the air photographs that fill every page are gorgeous and reveal so much. Anyone with half an eye for interpreting the features of landscape will want to linger over each of these photographs and find things for themselves. This is aided by the very high quality of reproduction and their size, which has been permitted by a generous square format. Throughout the book there are also highly informative maps and the occasional survey, although I think I would have preferred a few more, given the audience. From time to time also there are archive photographs and ground-level shots of specific monuments and sites. In all, then, a fitting introduction to this wonderful county and a splendid showcase for the work of the RCAHMW, especially for the powerfully archaeological and brilliantly aesthetic eye of one of today’s finest aerial photographers, Toby Driver, and his great predecessors in the Commission, especially Chris Musson and Terry James.