Watling Street

If you've read this far, you'll know what Watling Street is, so I won't rehash that. John Higgs travelled this road in summer 2016, when the idea of British identity was much on our minds. This ancient track becomes the setting for a mix of travelogue, social history, personal memoir and political musing. It's tempting to view him as a sort of countercultural Bill Bryson, and there is indeed that brand of obscure and entertaining facts and stories throughout this book, but also a kind of philosophical objective. He uses the conceit of a noosphere, a concatenation of myth, history, legend and fact that creates our own image of who we are, a sort of British Dreamtime.Through this he finds the ancient in the modern, as in the striking and surprising prologue, which links Stonehenge and Milton Keynes, to reveal our country as layer upon layer of stories, traditions, influences and ghosts that are still present in the here and now. It's a vision of Britain that celebrates Alan Moore as much as Churchill, that gives equal weight to Thomas Becket and the Winchester Geese, and one that struck much more of a chord with me than a thousand frothing Daily Express front pages.