The Salt Road

Marianne Culpepper set out in the first week of January to walk a road that has not carried salt since 1902, and which for most of its length is no longer a road. It runs from the brine springs at Droitwich to the tidal reach of the Severn, and it is now a hedge line, a footpath, a stretch of dual carriageway, and in three places a supermarket car park.

What she found was not a lost England. It was a working one — hauliers, a man rebuilding a lock gate, a woman who has counted the same stretch of river for thirty-one years — layered over the top of an older working one, and mostly indifferent to it.

Rosalind Vane reads it at walking pace, which is the right pace. This is a book about ground covered slowly and it would be ruined by anyone in a hurry.