4 out of 5 stars

We have a rich and long literary history in this country and whichever part of the country that you start in you can find an author and a little bit of history behind them to explain the context. In Footnotes, Peter Fiennes has chosen a dozen of his favourite authors to write about and travel to the places that they are best known in.

Starting in my home county of Dorset with the famous children’s writer Enid Blyton. Standing on the seafront in Swanage in a brutally cold wind, he imagines her in one of her books describing the weather as ‘lovely’. She was a complicated character and some of her books could be described as controversial in our more enlightened times. It was a place that she fell in love with after a day trip there from Bournemouth, and when you read some of her books you can sense the presence of the Purbecks.

His next author is Wilkie Collins and this part of Fiennes grand tour takes him to Cornwall. Collins was there to write a travel book set in Cornwall and he had got as far as Plymouth on the new-fangled railway, he would then have to rely on coaches after the boat across the Tamar. He stays with Colins in the next chapter and journey from Lamorna Cove to Launceston and is joined by Ithell Colquhoun, author of The Living Stones. There are no blue plaques celebrating her, unlike a lot of the other artists who were based here, but they do find where her hut was. It is very different from the corrugated iron shack she lived in though. Wending his way up the North cast he tops at Tintagel and has a heart-stopping moment crossing the slender bridge to get to the island.

He then heads on to Hereford, this time accompanied by Celia Fiennes, who is a distant relation of his. But as he points out you don’t have to go very far back up the family tree to see that we are much more interrelated than people think. She was moving around the West Country in 1698 where they had long miles and it was a time when very few people knew how far they were travelling and when they could expect to arrive. From Hereford, it is easy to cross the border into Wales and the earliest author in this book, Gerald of Wales. Gerald was part Welsh and in one of his books he spends half of it praising the people of the country and the later half denouncing the people. Heading to North Wales he is following Edith Somerville and Violet ‘Martin’ Ross and joins them struggling up Snowdon. They had discovered a demand for travel journalism and this was a Welsh jaunt to write and make some money.

Next Fiennes heads to the Midlands and is tracing the routes of J.B Priestly and Beryl Bainbridge from Birmingham to Liverpool. They had taken similar routes, but five decades apart and had both written books called, English Journey. He has a trip around the Cadbury factory whilst feeling slightly delicate after a night in a pub. Wilkie Collins is back again, but this time accompanying Dickens on a train journey to Cumberland and they undertake an almost disastrous climb of Carrock Fell. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell are the two authors that he has chosen for a brief visit to Scotland. Johnson had been invited by Boswell to visit for ages and was always too busy, but he relented and suddenly decided he wanted to see one of the last wildernesses in the UK. Heading south, Fiennes joins J.B Priestly and Beryl Bainbridge again in Newcastle. He bumps briefly into Celia Fiennes before heading to London and finally Kent to meet with Dickens again.

This book feels like a homage to his formative years as a reader rediscovering his favourite authors. But it is more than that, at its heart, it is a travel book as he moves around the country in the virtual company of his chosen writers and intertwined with this is history and a snapshot of modern Britain. It is a gentle and relaxed form of travel too; he is not in a rush to get to the next place and it gives him time to mull things over and discover those nuggets of information about the places he is staying and his virtual companions. Well worth reading.

3.5 out of 5 stars

We have a rich and deep literary history in this country, there are poets, playwrights and authors who have been inspired by the places that they have lived and created works that still resonate today.

Tearle’s journey around begins in Scotland with William Topaz McGonnal, sometimes known as the Bard of Dundee. He is widely considered to be the worst poet in the English language. He applied for patronage from Queen Victoria, who politely declined, but he took to be an expression of interest. He agreed to read some of his works, in a circus, on the condition that the audience could pelt his with rotten vegetables and eggs. He agreed as the money was handy.

Moving on from this auspicious start, Tearle takes us past Robbie Burns, Sir Walter Scott and how a break in Whitby gave the creator of Dracula, Stoker, plenty of material to work with. In York, he tells us the favourite poem of the middle ages and it isn’t what you think it is before recounting stories about Bradford’s favourite literary son, Priestly. Further south in Nottingham, DH Lawrence is in trouble again with his book, The White Peacock.

There are stories about books and poems that have been written in jail, authors who stayed in towns that no longer exist, one about the oldest bookshop in Britain and why Thomas is buried in two locations. Even, Terry Pratchett does get a mention twice.

It is not too bad overall. There are various stories in here that were new to me, though I was aware of a few of them. It can’t have been easy choosing from the vast number of writers to make this a complete country tour. Glad it wasn’t London Centric too. If there was one flaw, I would have liked a few more contemporary authors to get a mention, but that is only a small thing.

4.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Growing in up in Northern Ireland was tough in the time of the Troubles for all sorts of people. For Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s it was even harder. One parent was Protestant and the other Catholic and the area that they lived was part of a Protestant estate. Not fitting in with any of the divided communities really didn’t help, but she was witness to all sorts of traumatic events including witnessing the murder of a soldier as a small child, It got much harder to live there after her home was firebombed, but it was a place that felt that you could never escape from.

Moving to a new area of Ireland gave her a glimpse of what could be possible in her life, no one cared what her nominated religion was nor of her background. But still, the troubles impinged on her life; a friend was taken only an hour after seeing his and found later in a shallow grave. She somehow made it through school and university though and decided that Ireland was not for her anymore and headed to the UK. It was here that all the trauma of the past slowly caught up with her. She started drinking heavily, sunk into depression and gave up any hope that things might get better. She walked to the very edge of the abyss and waited her time.

There are places that speak of that unwritten language of letting go, of giving in, of being held like a hand in silent universal prayer

As heavy as this emotional baggage was there were points in her life that started the healing process long before she knows there was anything that could be fixed. Staying at Treshnish on the Isle of Mull, there was a day when the harr, a dense sea fog, had lifted and she was swimming in the dark waters in the intense blackness and silence of the place held her safe. She would sob beneath oak trees, her tears wetting the ground, the roots absorbing her sorrows. She would gather objects like a magpie, piling them up on her windowsills as fragments of memories of places and time spent alone. Her flatmate found her weeping uncontrollably under the stairs. She helped her to bed and then waited until she finally slept. Then came the moment on a beach in January when she felt held in a place other than this world; she had found a thin place. It was time to return to Ireland

Places only hold us close enough that we can finally see ourselves reflected back

At times this is a really hard book to read. Ní Dochartaigh has been through a lot in her life and she tells us about it in a way that is open, honest and unflinching in its intensity. She knows that her life story may well have been very different if she had made other choices. Thankfully she didn’t and this is why we have this book. She draws energy deeply from being in the wild outdoors, feeling the power of wind and water and understanding that we are mere moments in geological time. What she draws from the natural world is mirrored in her prose, which particularly in the second half of the book is just beautiful. This book might not be for everyone, but it comes highly recommended from me.

5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The convention of naming species was invented by the Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician Carl Linnaeus. He developed the formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. The system called plant taxonomy is a way of identifying and classifying the plants of the world. You need to have a good grasp of Latin, but the advantage is that you can tell someone else that exact plant that you saw on your walk.

It is a little bit elitist, having this knowledge sets apart those who have an almost academic way of finding species from those that just want to know the name of a particular plant that caught their eye. Thankfully people have been making their own names up to describe the plants that they see on a day to day basis. These common names have been known to the people of this country for hundreds of years in some cases. Thankfully this habit has not stopped. Vickery’s Folk Flora tells us what people have called these plants in the past, but more importantly, it shows that people are still naming the plants in their locality. Plant folklore in the British Isles is flourishing and adapting today.

The book is arranged in alphabetical order by their common names, and each entry has the Latin name (no getting away from it, sorry) a brief description of the plant concerned, details on the folklore, beliefs and traditional uses of the plant and how people have used them and other anecdotal details that Vickery thinks might be of interest. Also are included are all the local names for that particular plant that he could find. Some of these lists are fascinating, for example, the plant goosegrass, or as my wife called it, cleavers is a sticky stemmed plant. I remember I used to attach to the back of other children when they weren’t looking. This has around 90 other very local names, from sticky balls in Somerset to cleggers in Yorkshire and goose-cleaver in Lanarkshire

Looking through these common names is endlessly fascinating. I like the way that similar common names do not respect country boundaries. You can see the way that the name changes subtly as you move across the landscape and also when it has a very specific name used nowhere else in certain areas. It is startling how many different names there are in a single county for example Bull’s eyes, Crazy betty and Livers are all the same common name for the same plant, Marsh Marigold, in the county of Dorset and there are countless other examples of this.

It is quite the reference book that Vickery has compiled here. It is a good companion volume to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica. It took me ages to read it all, so daunting is its size and I read it the wrong way, ploughing through from front to back. This is a book to be dipped into and savoured rather than devoured in vast gulps. But I am glad I did get through it in the end as it is magnificent and should be on any natural history bookshelf.

4 out of 5 stars

Some people are spooked by graveyards, but I have never found a graveyard spooky or creepy. They are places where time stands still for those at rest. Words and numbers inscribed into a stone tell so much history too, of people who left early to miss the rush and those that evaded the walk across the black sands for a long time.

Uncovering those histories has been something that has captivated Peter Ross and in A Tomb With a View, he finds the stories of the people who inhabit graveyards and the people that still care about them. His journey will take him from the natural burial site of Sharpham Meadow in Devon where he meets Bridgitt and the resting place of her late husband Wayne where she is picking leaves off the discreet stone with his name on.

In Dublin, he goes to the graveyard of Glasnevin to discover its history. It was first known as Prospect Cemetery and the tragic tale of Shane MacThomáis who once told the stories of the people within its walls and took his own life on a tree in the grounds. He is now with his late father in the same plot. Getting married in a graveyard would probably be too much for some people, but for Liz and Shawn, it was the perfect place for a Halloween wedding.

It is not always about the place, sometime it is about the ritual and respect that the dead deserves. Death has been banished to a certain extent, gone are the days when the children in villages would want to see the recently deceased and all trooping up to the bedroom to pay those last respects. Ritual is important to those with faith too, and Ross spends time with a Muslim funeral director who has to collect a prepare a body for burial the following day so the soul can move on.

“Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’
Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘… Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

I thought that this was a really good book about how we as a modern society are coping with death and how it differs to the way that we treated the dead in the past. It is not morbid or grim to read, rather it has a strong narrative and is sensitively written about those that have departed but not left us. I am slightly surprised that he didn’t go to Brookwood Cemetery, the enormous place of rest just outside Woking; it is quite awe-inspiring walking around there; it does get a mention though. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The Maya were a people who inhabited a large chunk of central America. In their time they from 2000 b.c. to the late 900s, they had a highly developed culture and were known for their art, astronomical system and calendar as well as their architecture, art and their sophisticated writing system known as the logosyllabic script. After the collapse there were still people living in the region, even though some of the cities were still in use, many were abandoned. In the early 1500s, the first Spanish arrived and after a number of battles, they finally succumbed to the Spanish in 1697.

Even though they were defeated the people still survived and the remnants of their great civilisation slowly fell into ruin. The region is now separate countries, Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, but there are still seven million people that speak the old Mayan languages and whilst hey have suffered suppression for hundreds of years they still maintain their unique culture. This place and people have long fascinated Wright, he read every book he could about them prior to going there and from that made a list of places that he wanted to go on his travels there and he was soon on his way to Belize.

Heading south over the Hondo River in a battered old school bus he watches as the people change from the smaller Mexican people into colossal black matrons in floral bonnets. Pausing at Orange Walk Town, the police grab a passenger and march him off, wright heads to the Vietnam Bar for a drink before getting back on. The sugar plantations give way to wilder country and the radio on the bus is playing calypso. A little while passes and they enter the outskirts of Belize Town, driving through rusty corrugated iron corridors. Splashing through muddy puddles. It was time to find his hotel.

Moving on from Belize he heads over the disputed border into Guatemala. The officials are not the slightest bit interested in his luggage but do take the opportunity to charge him five quetzals for the tourist card that is clearly marked with a price of one quetzal. He crosses the bridge to the slightly seedy town of Melchor de Mencos with the hope of getting the camioneta. The bus is smelly and packed, he gets some fresh air when they are stopped are various checkpoints but the journey stops when they stuck. He hitches a lift with two American preachers from Florida and they drop him at a checkpoint where he decides that the next bus along will determine his destination for the day.

At the end of the vee rear the perfect cone of Volcan Agua, framed like the foresight of a rifle with a gun barrel of straight tarmac running towards it. The sky is clear, a deep steel blue, and the volcano wears a wreath of vapour that forms at the summit and streams from its leeward side the way a comets tail flees from the sun.

The third section of the book takes place in the southern part of Guatemala. He arrives in the city in an old 1950s Fokker that flies through the mountains rather than over them. He looks down on huts covered with pine shingles on the roofs. This is the fourth city, the others having been flattened by earthquakes volcanos and the Spanish. It is still a troubled country, a place where the native Indian have been oppressed by the white elite and it is in constant political turmoil. He is there for the ruins though and is being joined by a friend to see the structures of Quiriguá nestled amongst the bananas.

Finally, he ends up in Mexico, weary from the journey and then unable to sleep because of the maids crashing and banging and the squawking of the three parrots in reception. After a breakfast of Huevos rancheros, he heads to the New World Archaeological Foundation. He is meeting Suzanne and she shows him the various artefacts they found before leaving him in the library to lose himself amongst the books. In some of the towns, almost everyone is in the local dress, and the markets are an orderly bustle. In Chamula, for example, all the properties are owned by the Maya, and outsiders are banned from living in the centre of town. In the ruins of Bonampak that were rediscovered in 1946, he is there to see the murals. Even though they are covered with scaffolding they shine bright with colours and energy; just being in the presence of them is enough to generate a physical tingle.

When we get back to the lookout with the nine verses, the sun is about to drop off the edge of the world. Silver light pours from a chink in the overcast, painting fans between tiers of charcoal cloud.

He is primarily in the region for the archelogy and to absorb the history of the places, but what you, the reader, actually end up learning the most about is the people that live there now. His heart really is at home in this place and with the Maya. His conciliatory manner and endless curiosity draw out the best stories that they have to tell. It is beautifully written too, his extensive knowledge of the history of the places that he visits, helps add the extra depth to the prose. Well worth reading.

5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Having been a frequent visitor to Jersey and the zoo there for the past thirty years, the first thing that always comes to mind when I hear about Madagascar is lemurs. These fine creatures are a relative of the monkey that were separated when the landmass drifted away from the African continent and they evolved separately. The other thing that comes to mind is that exotic fruit of the orchid, vanilla. Apart from that, I knew almost nothing else about the place.

It is a unique place and huge too. It is the fourth largest island on the planet and if it was overlaid on Europe, it would stretch from London to Algiers. It had split from the Indian subcontinent around 88 million years ago and a lot of the creatures and wildlife evolved in isolation so over 90% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on our planet. It is largely undeveloped at the moment and only has a small number of metaled roads, the rest often end up as quagmire.

It is a place that John Gimlette had been to before, but he was here again for three months to see what made the place tick. He arrived in the capital, Antananarivo in the middle of an outbreak of bubonic plague. It was sobering stuff, but he then hears that it is a regular occurrence and doesn’t affect many people and then other rumours saying that it was nothing and the government had done very nicely out of the donations from other countries. The city is 4000 feet up in the highlands and to him, it sometimes feels like a slightly sleepy town in the middle of France and at other time a bustling Asian slum. He heads out every day into a different part of the city, walking the streets to get a feel for the character of the place. He is not trying to get lost and if he is a little disorientated then glancing up to see where the Rova, the burnt-out palace, helps hi find his way again.

Heading out of the city, he is keen to see more of the countryside, though it is described as being like the 12th Century is certain places. It is not quite the badlands out there, but he hears stories of the Vazimba, the super ancestors and ghosts that blur the lines between history and myth and are said to inhabit every dark corner, waiting for revenge. Like the people who first inhabited this island and how they got there from across the Indian ocean, it is a mystery that makes little sense.

I was suddenly very happy to be here, wherever I was. All In knew was that I’d reached the very end of Madagascar (although at that moment, it felt like the end of the earth).

The south-west of the country feel like the wild west, it is sparsely populated and ahs been under the control of various warring tribes. There is only one town of any size, Toliara, and it suffers from droughts, scorpions, locusts, termites and even the plants are spiky. He was warned about going, but it seemed to be the right thing to do. The people in the town seemed remarkably happy, probably as the rainy season had finished and they had dry weather for the next six months. They do suffer from raids by the malaso, gangs that steal everything from the locals who had precious little to start with anyway.

Back in the 1680s St Mary’s Island, just off Madagascar was home to around 1000 gangsters and criminals; under normal circumstances, it would be full of Europeans sitting on the beach until it was time to travel back home again. It doesn’t quite feel like the mainland either, he is one moment eating a roast crab and is then whisked off to visit the dead with his guide, Fidele or to see a shrine of several hundred pens, created by students seeking luck in their exams.

It is a strange country. He had got used to it after being there for a while, but when his is joined by his wife and daughter on the wonderfully named island of Nosy Be. They watched in silent disbelief as hey passed fishermen singing as they worked and saw naked men cupping their balls in one hand whilst waving with the other. It never seemed to make sense, but then neither did it have to.

Sometimes in Madagascar you wonder whether it is you going mad, or everyone else.

I have read Wild Coast by John Gimlette a while ago now and thought it was an excellent book about Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. This is a part of the world that very few people know little about. He takes on Madagascar in a similar way, taking the time to get to know the places, history and most of all the people of this vast island and this book is as excellent as Wild Coast. He does not pass judgement on the people and their activities, rather choosing to observe and then try to make sense of things as he writes them down. He writes in such a way that you feel alongside him being bumped along in the same car, walking the dunes as the sun sets, or chuckling at the street names in the town together. It is a beautifully produced book too, scattered throughout are excellent photos of the island landscape, significant places that he visited and most importantly the people of this fine country. The cover is stunning and I must say it had superb colour maps of the regions that he visits helping put it all in context. A must-read book on Madagascar.