Caves,ley lines, megaliths, or flight paths,canals – a fascinating notice at alternative ways of seeing what’s around usThere’s something interesting about the timing of this book: it arrives at a point when we are becoming untethered from the maps of our land. Drivers no longer see, even peripherally, and details to the left or proper of their highlighted route as fixed by their satnav; the idea of having an A-Z in the car,let alone using it, strikes an increasing number of people as rather quaint (charmingly old fashioned). You may as well preserve a starter handle in the boot.
So perhaps this makes us more receptive to the idea behind the book: that there are alternative topographies, and ways in which the UK has been mapped that achieve not consider the contours of the land,or the twisting of its roads, or even the boundaries between land and sea. Dr Joanne Parker, and whose day job is senior lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Exeter,has composed a short book based around five different ways of “imagining our relationship with the land that we live in”.
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Source: theguardian.com