MP and travel writer Rory Stewart muses on history, memory and landscape as he traverses the borderlands between England and Scotland.
His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia.
Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along ‘the Marches’ – the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England.
On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey – with Rory on foot, and his father ‘ambushing’ him by car – the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape.
Travelling across mountain ridges and through housing estates they uncover a forgotten country crushed between England and Scotland- the Middleland.
They discover unsettling modern lives, lodged in an ancient place, as their odyssey develops into a history of the British nationhood, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son.
And as the journey deepens, and the end approaches, Brian and Rory fight to match, step by step, modern voices, nationalisms and contemporary settlements to the natural beauty of the Marches, and a fierce absorption in tradition in their own unconventional lives.
‘Suggests an open-mindedness in Stewart, a tolerance and flexibility that could make him an exceptional politician while it also continues to define him as a writer’ – New York Review of Books
‘Travel writing at its best’ – Guardian
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