Take your time,and look

For Christopher Somerville,the age of Sat Nav and GPS is one of paradox....

For Christopher Somerville,the age of Sat Nav and GPS is one of paradox. We are better than ever before at finding our way from A to B,but we know less and less about whats in between. As we get better at navigating,we become lost in our own countries. The soothing screen of a Sat Nav system shows roads as thin,abstract strips striding through a featureless grey emptiness. Real life the rivers,towns,caves,cliffs,bridges,battlefields,towers,cairns,factories and palaces that make up the world is nowhere to be seen,and so the memory of it fades slowly from our collective consciousness.

To redress the balance and to rescue geography for all those who didnt pay attention in school Mr Somerville has written a short natural history of his home country of Britain. On the surface,it takes the form of a jaunty guidebook,full of jokes,obscure facts and the kind of helpful impressionism that more formal travel guides lack the psychic smell of Edinburgh,we are told,is Gothic. It contains a shortlist of landmarks,lighthearted sketches of regions and a fascinating discussion of British rivers,among much else.

But sit down and read the lightly written book from cover to cover and it becomes clear that it is also a prose paean to the accumulated detritus of an old society with a well-recorded history and a keen interest some would say an obsession in preserving its past. Many of the landmarks he lists hint at bigger stories,such as the Derbyshire church with a wonky spire that leans almost three metres 10 feet out of true thanks to the inexperience of its greenhorn builders all the experienced builders having died a few years previously during the Black Death. This is geography not as a dry academic subject full of jargon and terminology,but as the natural history of a living,evolving landscape.

Nor is it all backward-looking nostalgia: modern icons jostle with ancient attractions,and the writing is heavily salted with popular culture. Physical geography is treated just as respectfully as its human counterpart. For Mr Some-rville the flatlands of Cambridgeshire are just as beautiful,in their own way,as the looming,mist-cloaked isles that dot the western seas off Scotland or the moody moors of northern Yorkshire. That he can conjure such delights from the decidedly non-epic scale of the British landscape is a welcome reminder that there is a great deal of beauty and fascination in small things,providing one takes the time to look,instead of hurrying past on the way to a distant destination.

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010