Walking the Bones of Britain: A 3 Billion Year Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary

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 north western 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.
'An illuminating take on the British landscape ... a remarkable achievement. Encounters, warm humour, history and plenty of geology carry you down the winding tracks.' - Tom Chesshyre, author of Lost in the LakesTravelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville (walking correspondent of The Times and author of Coast, The January Man and Ships of Heaven) sets out to interrogate the land beneath our feet, and how it has affected every aspect of human history from farming to house construction, the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis.In his thousand-mile journey, Somerville follows the story of Britain's unique geology, travelling from the three billion year old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, down the map south eastwards across bogs, over peaks and past quarry pits to the furthest corner of Essex where new land is being formed by nature and man.Demystifying the sometimes daunting technicalities of geology with humour and a characteristic lightness of touch, Somerville's book tells a story of humanity's reckless exploitation and a lemming-like surge towards self-annihilation but also shows seeds of hope as we learn how we might work with geology to avert a climate catastrophe.It cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door.