Walking the Bones of Britain

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Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville, author of The January Man and Ships of Heaven, sets out to discover how the land beneath our feet shapes our past, our present and our future. Britain is blessed with a vast variety of landscapes - from marshes to slate mountains, chalk downs to volcanic islands. How we live, work and eat has been moulded and shaped by wild, violent events that occurred thousands, millions, even billions of years ago - drownings and upheavals, the raging fires and frozen wastes that created the bones of Britain. Following the line of oldest exposed geology, from three-billion-year-old rocks at the Butt of Lewis in the far northwestern tip, down the map south eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex where new land is being recycled from old, Somerville travels across bogs and over peaks, through forests and national parks and along tow paths, revisiting old haunts and expert friends, picking out rare flora and fauna, as he uncover the changing landscape's buried secrets. Vivid, lyrical and evocative, Walking the Bones of Britain is a deep interrogation of the remarkable place we call home.