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Walking the Great North Line by Robert Twigger
£10.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781474609067
Published:
01 Apr 2021
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
304 pages
Dimensions:
196x130x28mm
Weight:
0.279kgs
Author:
Lay out a map of Britain and something odd becomes apparent: at 1 degree 50 minutes west there is a dead straight line going true north from Stonehenge to Lindisfarne. Two of Britain's most-ancient and most-revered sites. But there is more. Starting in the south, the line goes dead north from Castle Ditches to old Sarum, through Stonehenge, Knap Hill, and Avebury stone circles, past ancient places in Cricklade, Bibury, Notgrove, and Wootton Wawen. It goes through Long Low, Thor's Cave, Mam Tor, nearby Twelve Apostles stone circle, Ilkley Roman site, The Badger stone, ancient sites in Lanchester, Eochester, Millstone Burn, Bewick Hill and all the way to finish plum on Lindisfarne Island - one of the most ancient of early Christian sites and still a retreat and monastery. Robert Twigger has travelled this ancient line on foot, like a biologist walking a transect.
Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dead straight line following 1 degree 50 West up Britain. No other north-south straight line goes through so many ancient sites of such significance.
Was it just a suggestive coincidence or were they built intentionally? Twigger walks the line, which takes him through Birmingham, Halifax and Consett as well as Salisbury Plain, the Peak district, and the Yorkshire moors. With a planning schedule that focused more on reading about shamanism and beat poetry than hardening his feet up, he sets off ever hopeful. He wild-camps along the way, living like a homeless bum, with a heart that starts stifled but ends up soaring with the beauty of life. He sleeps in a prehistoric cave, falls into a river, crosses a 'suicide viaduct' and gets told off by a farmer's wife for trespassing; but in this simple life he finds woven gold. He walks with others and he walks alone, ever alert to the incongruities of the edgelands he is journeying through.
About the Author: ROBERT TWIGGER has won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His twelve books have been translated into over twenty languages and cover both fiction and non-fiction, memoir and travel. He spent a year training with the Tokyo riot police, crossed Canada in a homemade birchbark canoe and was the first person to traverse entirely on foot the Egyptian Great Sand Sea. His quarterly comic of memoir and travel, This Simple Life, is available at roberttwigger.com
| Number of pages | 304 |
|---|
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| First Item | 2 Items & Over | |
|---|---|---|
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| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
| Collect in Store | free | free |
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