RING THE HILL

A book written around and about hills written with Tom Cox's inimitable voice and studded with his trademark humour. It includes a northern hill, a European hill, some hills from East Anglia that can barely be called hills at all, a hill that never ends and the smallest hill in England. Each chapter takes a type of hill whether it's a knoll, cap, cliff, tor or even a mere bump as a starting point for one of Tom's characteristically unpredictable and wide-ranging explorations. His candid prose roams from an intimate relationship with a particular cove on the south coast, to meditations on his great-grandmother and a lesson on what goes into the mapping of hills themselves. These can lead to an account of an intimate relationship with a beach, a journey into Cox's past, or a lesson from an expert. 'On the skyline to the north, Whiting's deft church and the glowing red telephone mast, symbols of the old and new religions, continued their debate, until night gradually snuffed out the former. Looking towards the long, blurring wall of the Mendips, taking in the commanding hills and flatlands, it struck me that I had in my haphazard way ended up living in a landscape that was a composite of the two very different places on opposite margins of the country that I have loved most deeply...Norfolk and Devon.' Original, unexpected and imaginative nature and travel writing. 309pp, illustrated paperback.