British Topography

  • The Welsh: The Biography. A white cover with the red Welsh dragon in the centre. Red and green text

    The Welsh: The Biography

    The Welsh: The Biography tells the story of the remarkable survival of the oldest nation and oldest language in Europe. We see how the four original major Celtic tribes are still reflected in the location of Britain’s four oldest cathedrals, and how after one and a half millennia of constant invasions and eventual conquest, the…

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  • All the wide border. A grey-brown drawing of a castle in the background, with red tree shape at the front with a person facing the castle in the centre. Blue sky with clouds

    All the Wide Border

    All the Wide Border is a personal journey through the places, amongst the people, and across the divides of the border between England and Wales. Taking in some of our loveliest landscapes, and our darkest secrets, this is a region of immeasurable wonder and interest. It is here that the deepest roots and thorniest paradoxes…

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  • The living mountain. Off white cover with a distant deer (or similar animal)

    The Living Mountain

    In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a…

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  • Bookshop Tours. Blue background with an off white map of Britain showing small drawings of attractions. Bold black text in centre

    Bookshop Tours of Britain

    Bookshop Tours of Britain is a slow-travel guide to Britain, navigating bookshop to bookshop. Across 18 bookshop tours, the reader journeys from the Jurassic Coast of southwest England, over the mountains of Wales, through England’s industrial heartland, up to the Scottish Highlands and back via Whitby, the Norfolk Broads, central London, the South Downs and…

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  • take the slow road scotland book

    Take the Slow Road: Scotland

    Forget hurrying. Forget putting your foot down and racing through sweeping bends. Forget the understeer (whatever that is). Forget the blur of a life lived too fast. This is a look at taking life slowly. It’s about taking the time to enjoy journeys and places for their own sake. It’s about stopping and putting the…

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  • Forgotten Castles of Wales and the Marches

    Forgotten Castles of Wales and the Marches

    Wales is a land of castles. The best known are probably those built in the thirteenth century under King Edward I to defeat the native princes, but the most numerous lie across the south of the country and along the border with England, in the region known as the Welsh Marches. These areas were fought…

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  • real hay on wye

    Real Hay-on-Wye

    This addition to the Real Series explores the town of Hay-on-Wye, home to the prestigious the Hay Literature Festival and How the Light Gets In festival, and Town of Books. Kate Noakes ventures into its hinterland, which is historically so much a part of the town too. The Black Mountains to the south, the river…

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  • The Book of the Thames

    The Book of the Thames

    ‘The Thames is the King of Island Rivers;’ if deficient in the grander features of landscape, it is rich in pictorial beauty; its associations are closely linked with heroic men and glorious achievements; its antiquities are of the rarest and most instructive order’…

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  • Hill Farm Story

    Hill Farm Story

    The title of Ruth Janette Ruck’s first book Place of Stones is a translation of Carneddi, the name of the author’s eighty-three acre farm in the wild mountains of Snowdonia. She told us how, on leaving school in an English city at the end of the Second World War, with virtually no capital except the…

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