THE idea for this rather strange book came to Graham Robb in the autumn of 2018, when he and his wife, returning from a cycling holiday in France to their home on the Anglo-Scottish border, were stranded at Preston railway station by a hurricane. They took their bicycles off the train, and, with the help of a compass and map, made their way to Lancaster via a Roman road and other ancient tracks, prompting the realisation that “we had ridden an accidentally coherent route backward through two thousand years of British history.”
The resulting work is a sweeping survey of the nation’s history, from the fossilised brachiopods that inhabited the warm, shallow waters of the Equator more than 300 million years ago, and were later lifted northwards by shifting tectonic plates, to the 2024 General Election. The broadly chronological narrative is regularly interspersed with references to significant places and episodes in the author’s own life, and in the lives of family members. Rural Worcestershire, Oxford, and north Cumbria figure most prominently.
There is a breathless, staccato quality to the writing which makes for a rather giddy read, and it is difficult to absorb all the information that the author seeks to impart. There are certain themes to which he returns throughout the book — perhaps the most noticeable being a marked anti-clericalism and lack of enthusiasm for the Church. He identifies this as a British characteristic, which can be traced back to the Venerable Bede’s description in his Life of Cuthbert of crowds jeering and cheering as monks drown in the mouth of the Tyne.
Robb recalls from his own Church of England primary school “the soul-withering tedium of the vicar’s half-hour, or more to the point, one-thousand-eight-hundred-seconds-long homilies”, and he has a long section towards the end on relatively recent child abuse by Roman Catholic priests.
He produces a chilling statistic that I had not come across before, apparently culled from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse set up by Theresa May in 2015: that one tenth of the British population below the age of 16 were abused by one-and-a-half per cent of the adult population.
At times, this book has echoes of the affectionate portrayal of the English countryside by such writers as William Cobbett and Ronald Blythe, but it lacks their lyricism, and the whistle-stop nature of its ride through British history provides little opportunity for reflection.
Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.
The Discovery of Britain: An accidental history
Graham Robb
Picador £22
(978-1-0350-2611-1)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80