The Marches
A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This father-and-son trek through the history and landscape of the United Kingdom is “a sensitive exploration of what borders mean and don’t mean” (The Wall Street Journal).
In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart walked some of the most dangerous borderlands in the world. Now he travels with his eighty-nine-year-old father—a comical, wily, courageous, and infuriating former British intelligence officer—along the border they call home.
On Stewart’s four-hundred-mile walk across a magnificent natural landscape, he sleeps on mountain ridges and in housing projects, in hostels and farmhouses. With every fresh encounter—from an Afghanistan veteran based on Hadrian’s Wall to a shepherd who still counts his flock in sixth-century words—Stewart uncovers more about the forgotten peoples and languages of a vanished country, now crushed between England and Scotland. Stewart and his father are drawn into unsettling reflections on landscape, their parallel careers in the bygone British Empire and Iraq, and the past, present, and uncertain future of the United Kingdom. And as the end approaches, the elder Stewart’s stubborn charm transforms this chronicle of nations into a fierce, exuberant encounter between a father and a son.
“[Stewart] anchors his lively mix of history, travelogue, and reportage on local communities in a vibrant portrait of his father, who was both a tartan-wearing Scotsman and a thoroughly British soldier and diplomat.”—Publishers Weekly
“Stewart brings a humane empathy to his encounters with people and landscape.”—The Washington Post
“An unforgettable tale.” —National Geographic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The blurry geographic and cultural line between regions that have been (and might someday be) separate nations is explored in this ruminative travelogue. Stewart, an Englishman who grew up partly in Scotland and represents an English border district in Parliament, follows The Places In Between, his 2006 account of trekking across Afghanistan by foot, with this narrative of walking trips through English-Scottish border areas. Musing on the nature of frontiers, he ponders Hadrian's Wall marking Roman Britain off from the barbarian north; the Northumbrian lands where medieval Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse settlers uneasily coexisted; cross-border feuds that inspired Walter Scott's romances; and the separatist impulses surrounding the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. He also paints vivid portraits of the region's rich (though sodden) landscapes, and trenchantly critiques environment policies that try to return the human-scaled "living countryside" of 1,000-year-old grazing and farming terrain to wild bog and forest for the sake of biodiversity and carbon sinks. Stewart anchors his lively mix of history, travelogue, and reportage on local communities in a vibrant portrait of his father, who was both a tartan-wearing Scotsman and a thoroughly British soldier and diplomat. This is a subtle, clear-eyed, ardent case for the United Kingdom's future, one that recognizes cross-border divisions but deeply values ties that bind.
