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Author: Christopher Somerville Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1473576830 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
‘Somerville’s infectious enthusiasm and wry humour infuse his journey from the Isle of Lewis to southern England, revealing our rich geological history with vibrant local and natural history’ Observer ‘A meticulous exploration of the ground beneath our feet. Glorious’ Katharine Norbury ‘A remarkable achievement’ Tom Chesshyre ‘His writing is utterly enticing’ Country Walking ............................................................................................................................................... The influence Britain’s geology has had on our daily lives is profound. While we may be unaware of it, every aspect of our history has been affected by events that happened ten thousand, a million, or a thousand million years ago. In Walking the Bones of Britain, Christopher Somerville takes a journey of a thousand miles, beginning in the far north, at the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, and travelling south-eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex, where new land is being formed. Crossing bogs, scaling peaks and skirting quarry pits, he unearths the stories bound up in the layers of rock beneath our feet, and examines how they have influenced everything from how we farm to how we build our houses, from the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. Told with characteristic humour and insight, this gripping exploration of the British landscape and its remarkable history cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door. ‘Somerville is a walker’s writer’ Nicholas Crane
Author: Christopher Somerville Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1473576830 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
‘Somerville’s infectious enthusiasm and wry humour infuse his journey from the Isle of Lewis to southern England, revealing our rich geological history with vibrant local and natural history’ Observer ‘A meticulous exploration of the ground beneath our feet. Glorious’ Katharine Norbury ‘A remarkable achievement’ Tom Chesshyre ‘His writing is utterly enticing’ Country Walking ............................................................................................................................................... The influence Britain’s geology has had on our daily lives is profound. While we may be unaware of it, every aspect of our history has been affected by events that happened ten thousand, a million, or a thousand million years ago. In Walking the Bones of Britain, Christopher Somerville takes a journey of a thousand miles, beginning in the far north, at the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, and travelling south-eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex, where new land is being formed. Crossing bogs, scaling peaks and skirting quarry pits, he unearths the stories bound up in the layers of rock beneath our feet, and examines how they have influenced everything from how we farm to how we build our houses, from the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. Told with characteristic humour and insight, this gripping exploration of the British landscape and its remarkable history cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door. ‘Somerville is a walker’s writer’ Nicholas Crane
Author: Robert Twigger Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN: 1474609074 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
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.
Author: Christopher Somerville Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1473527139 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
'Evocatively written and charming' - Countryfile 'The January Man is a book that makes you want to pull on your boots, grab a map and get out there' - Country Life The January Man is the story of a year of walks that was inspired by a song, Dave Goulder's 'The January Man'. Month by month, season by season and region by region, Christopher Somerville walks the British Isles, following routes that continually bring his father to mind. As he travels the country - from the winter floodlands of the River Severn to the lambing pastures of Nidderdale, the towering seabird cliffs on the Shetland Isle of Foula in June and the ancient oaks of Sherwood Forest in autumn - he describes the history, wildlife, landscapes and people he encounters, down back lanes and old paths, in rain and fair weather. This exquisitely written account of the British countryside not only inspires us to don our boots and explore the 140,000 miles of footpaths across the British Isles, but also illustrates how, on long-distance walks, we can come to an understanding of ourselves and our fellow walkers. Over the hills and along the byways, Christopher Somerville examines what moulded the men of his father's generation - so reticent about their wartime experiences, so self-effacing, upright and dutiful - as he searches for 'the man inside the man' that his own father really was.
Author: Christopher Somerville Publisher: ISBN: 9781444704648 Category : Great Britain Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Christopher Somerville presents the basics of what belongs where in the UK, which counties border one another and what lies beyond the Watford Gap. He reminds us of the watery bits, the lumpy bits and the flat bits of the country, and gets to grips with the smaller islands surrounding Britain.
Author: Nicholas Redman Publisher: ISBN: Category : Bone carving Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
Artforms grew out of a desire to introduce art through an engaging visual experience. It is written and designed to help readers build an informed foundation for individual understanding and enjoyment of art. By introducing art theory, practice, and history in a single volume, this book aims to draw readers nto a new or expanded awareness of the visual arts.
Author: Sarah Raughley Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 153445358X Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
An African tightrope walker who can’t die gets embroiled in a secret society’s deadly gladiatorial tournament in this “bloodily spectacular” (Chloe Gong, New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights) historical fantasy set in an alternate 1880s London, perfect for fans of The Last Magician and The Gilded Wolves. As an African tightrope dancer in Victorian London, Iris is used to being strange. She is certainly an unusual sight for leering British audiences always eager for the spectacle of colonial curiosity. But Iris also has a secret that even “strange” doesn’t capture… She cannot die. Haunted by her unnatural power and with no memories of her past, Iris is obsessed with discovering who she is. But that mission gets more complicated when she meets the dark and alluring Adam Temple, a member of a mysterious order called the Enlightenment Committee. Adam seems to know much more about her than he lets on, and he shares with her a terrifying revelation: the world is ending, and the Committee will decide who lives…and who doesn’t. To help them choose a leader for the upcoming apocalypse, the Committee is holding the Tournament of Freaks, a macabre competition made up of vicious fighters with fantastical abilities. Adam wants Iris to be his champion, and in return he promises her the one thing she wants most: the truth about who she really is. If Iris wants to learn about her shadowy past, she has no choice but to fight. But the further she gets in the grisly tournament, the more she begins to remember—and the more she wonders if the truth is something best left forgotten.
Author: Olga Tokarczuk Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0525541357 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie Proulx In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
Author: Laurie Lee Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher ISBN: 1567923925 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
"I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far." Despite this romantic and optimistic opening, what Lee finds is the most primitive and feudal country in Europe, a peninsula untouched by the modern world, a land of labor without dignity, a church devoid of compassion, and a country ripe for revolutionary change.
Author: Tim Moore Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 146687046X Category : Humor Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
"'A donkey?' blurted my family as one. For a moment it didn't seem they'd ever be able to list all the reasons that made this so entertainingly ludicrous. . . .Yes, I'd never ridden a donkey on a beach or petted one at a city farm, never even pinned a cardboard tail to one's throat after the cake and ice cream....A donkey would be my hairy-coated hair shirt, making my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela a truer test of the will, a trial." With these words, having no knowledge of Spanish and even less about the care and feeding of donkeys, Tim Moore, Britain's indefatigable traveling Everyman, sets out on a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela with a donkey named Shinto as his companion. Armed only with the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century handbook to the route, and expert advice on donkey management from Robert Louis Stevenson, Moore and his four-legged companion travel the ancient five-hundred-mile route from St. Jean Pied-de-Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees, to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, which houses the remains of Spain's patron saint, St. James. Over sun-scorched highways, precipitous bridges, dirt paths shaded by leafy trees, and vineyards occasionally lashed by downpours, Moore and Shinto pass through some of the oldest towns and cities in northern Spain in colorful company, both past and present. Pilgrims real and imagined have traveled this route throughout the ages, a diverse cast of wayfarers spanning Charlemagne, St. Francis of Assisi, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and New Age diva, Shirley MacLaine. Moore's present-day companions are no less florid or poignant. Clearly more interested in Shinto than in Moore, their fellow walkers are an assortment of devout Christian pilgrims, New Age spirituality seekers, travelers grieving over a lost love affair, Baby Boomers contemplating the advent of middle age, and John Q. Public just out for a cheap, boozy sun-drenched outdoor holiday. As Moore pushes, pulls, wheedles, cajoles, and threatens Shinto across Spain toward the crypt of St. James in a quest to find the spiritual pilgrim within, the duo overnights in the bedrooms, dormitories, and---for Shinto---adjacent grassy fields of northern Spain's hostels, inns, convents, seminaries, and farmhouses. Shinto, a donkey with a finely honed talent for relieving himself at the most inopportune moments, has better luck in the search for his next meal than Moore does in finding his inner St. Francis. Undaunted, however, Man and Beast finally arrive at the cathedral and a successful end to their journey. For readers who delighted in his earlier books, Travels with My Donkey is the next hilarious chapter in the travels of Tim Moore, a book that keeps the bones of St. James rattling till this day.
Author: Peter Toghill Publisher: Crowood ISBN: 1847973612 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 524
Book Description
This book is a geological history of Britain from over 2,000 million years ago to the present day and describes the enormous variety of rocks, minerals and fossils that form this fascinating island. An introductory chapter covers the fundamental principles of geology. Further chapters describe the rocks, minerals and fossils of the recognised periods of geological time, and the areas where they are found today. This book is written for the lay person interested in the great variety of Britain's rocks and landscapes but also includes a wealth of information for students at all levels.
Author: Christopher Somerville
Author: Christopher Somerville
Author: Robert Twigger
Author: Christopher Somerville
Author: Christopher Somerville
Author: Nicholas Redman
Author: Sarah Raughley
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Author: Laurie Lee
Author: Tim Moore
Author: Peter Toghill