If you've never heard John Higgs' and Dr David Bramwell's fantastic 'pyschographical' journey along the UK's oldest highway - Watling Street - you are missing out. Along the way we meet writers Alan Moore and Andy Miller, poet Salena Godden, singer Cerys Matthews, and many more.
The Guardian describes the book, upon which the podcast is based, like this:
'Watling Street, a hybrid of travel journalism and pavement-pounding sociology, is a journey by car, train and on foot along the ancient Watling Street, which runs from the south-east coast of Kent to north Wales. The journey opens near St Margaret’s Bay, where Ian Fleming lived in a cottage he bought in the early 1950s from Noël Coward, and ends in the wilds of Anglesey. Higgs hopes that his journey might provide some insight into the strange, dark mood that “hangs over our seemingly divided country”.
In chatty, entertaining pages, he excavates Britain for myths and stories that might “serve us better” as we prepare to leave the EU. In the course of his east-west journey towards Anglesey, Higgs considers pagan Green Man motifs, druids, the Canterbury Tales, the Carry On films, Morris dancing and, not least, the Dover-Canterbury-London 007 coaches. Insofar as it exists, British identity should not be imposed by the “state, monarchy or military”; rather, Higgs adds, in full mystic mode, it should “bubble naturally out of the land”.'
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