Over hill and dale

When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle bland abstractions. Many of his parliamentary colleagues inhabit a blah-blah land where terms such as ‘peace process’ and ‘international community’ have meaning. An upbringing in the Far East, where his father was a diplomat, as well as years spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, have given Stewart direct experience not only of nations but of town quarters, villages and individuals.

Walking was his preferred method in Afghanistan, where he tramped across the country with a dog and a Punjabi fighting stick. The dog couldn’t keep up and died, but here for his latest tramp the Punjabi dang comes out again. Somehow he has found time when not at Westminster nor attending to his Cumbria constituency, nor with his young family, to walk 600 miles through the border country of England and Scotland, formally interview dozens of people and then to write it all up in this substantial and very impressive book.

His themes are various. He writes in detail of the area during the Roman period, its ethnic diversity then and now. He teases out place names and bird names, and what they reveal of the mosaic of peoples — English, Celtic, Cumbric, Northumbrian and Norse — who have settled there. He is concerned above all with questions of belonging and tradition and locality in a globalised world. His trek necessarily looks for local difference, for what makes one valley or village distinct from another. But he finds little awareness or interest in such things among local inhabitants, who no longer share generations of accumulated experience. Most come from somewhere else. ‘I’m beginning to think Britain isn’t one place, or two, or three,’ he muses.