by Tom Cox
9781783529018
Paperback
16 April 2020
'Always engaging, charming, funny and often moving . . .
It made me want to pull on my stoutest boots and follow in his footsteps' Stephen Fry'Beautiful, funny, fascinating, impossible-to-categorise . . .
Like going on a great ramble with a knowledgeable, witty, engaging friend. Tom Cox brings magic to the most mundane of subjects' Marian Keyes'Sheer bloody genius . .
. I loved it. Then I loved it more' John Lewis-Stempel, author of MeadowlandA hill is not a mountain.
You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked 'Quite A Lot Of Hills' where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are. Ring the Hill is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes a northern hill, 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.
Tom's lyrical, 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. Because a good walk in the hills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might lead.