The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration of England, Hugh Thomson, 2012, Preface, hardback, 310p, ISBN 978-1-84809-332-4, £18-99.

This is not a conventional work of local history but it has local history affiliations and dimensions. It is very idiosyncratic in approach but it is nonetheless very engaging.

Hugh Thomson, an inveterate overseas travel writer, decided for personal reasons - including losing his driving licence for six months - to make a long distance walk across England from Chesil Bank in Dorset to Holme-next-the Sea in Norfolk. In other words he followed the alignment of the Icknield Way, which he tells us was a prehistoric trade route, an alignment rather than a specific track in some places, by which Mediterranean merchants transported goods en route, in some instances, to and from northern Europe.

What intrigued me especially was the fact that I had visited, and studied, many of the places on this route without sensing the sinuous link which drew them all together - Maiden Castle, Stonehenge, the Uffington White Horse, Wallingford, Ewelme, Baldock, Royston, Hunstanton and Holme-next-the-Sea itself, to mention some of the more evocative locations. It further intrigued me that this route, avoiding any major modern conurbation, is basically still available now to observers of the historic landscape; and Hugh Thomson can be our guide to the plethora of Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and more recent structures and features which follow this route, to the extent that one can see that from the Bronze Age until the Anglo-Saxons its role was also as a potential defensive line.

In reading this book, which I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend, do not expect to find a systematic and scholarly discourse on the local history and archaeology of the Icknield Way. However Hugh Thomson does introduce us to innumerable prehistoric sites and explores their context and origin very helpfully, but does so very much in the style of Jerome K. Jerome, whose influence I sense, with encounters with interesting and eccentric people and events all along this route, in an altogether very engaging manner.