Summerbook #20: Walking the Bones of Britain

Walking the Bones of Britain:  A 3,000 Million Year Geological Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary, by Christopher Somerville

I suppose it's a bit ironic that this was my first summer book, and it just took me the whole time to read it.  There's a lot of geology and it's not a terribly light read, so I took it slow and enjoyed the walk.

Christopher Somerville is the walking correspondent for the Times, because of course the Times has a walking correspondent.   This is the UK, and walking is big.  He's written quite a few books, and this one I picked up two years ago in a little bookshop during our Ridgeway hike.  (I told the bookshop lady I liked books about walking, but not Robert Macfarlane, and she showed me this guy.  Yes!)

The premise of this particular book is that if you look at a geological map of Great Britain, especially the simple and colorful kind of Somerville's old schoolbooks, you see that you can kind of start at the oldest point in the northwest and go down, diagonally and somewhat chronologically, to the newest part in the southeast.  Here is the kind of thing students saw back in the day:

 So Somerville started on the Isle of Lewis and worked his way down, and talked with geologists along the way.  Each chapter has a close-up map and a focus on what the geology is like, though there's plenty about scenery and pubs and sore feet and wildflowers and rain too.  It's very fun to mix Pangaea and names of other ancient continents in, and learn why sarsen stone is called that*, and so on.  Not only did I enjoy the walks, I like the stripy cover too.  I liked them both so much I bought two other stripy Somerville books about wandering around the UK.  Highly recommended if you're prepared to spend a lot of time on it. 

*Sarsen is a corruption of Saracen, which basically meant foreign to the people who noticed that sarsen stone was different than everything else around.