Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place

Travel writer Marsden (The Levelling Sea) whose previous works chronicled trips to Russia, Armenia, and Ethiopia, returns home to walk the length of the Cornwall region, a peninsula located in the southwest corner of Great Britain. Marsden employs an array of disciplines and devices to capture both the ruggedness and beauty of the landscape and more challengingly, to successfully convey a sense of the land's ephemeral "spirit," imbued in the moors and hills by its unique geography and history. Walking east to west, metaphorically through time, and concluding at the aptly named Land's End, Marsden explores and offers commentary on the mysterious manmade arrangements of stones dotting the landscape, dating from the Neolithic era; places where Arthurian legends hover over the land; regions where talk of druids still endures; and the environmental degradation left by the industrial extraction of clay from the land. Alongside Marsden's ruminations on landscape, there is a smaller parallel narrative that describes making repairs to his recently purchased ramshackle Cornish home and acts as a subtle addition to the philosophical speculations on the power of place. Marsden is erudite and brings his knowledge of geology, etymology, history, and philosophy, as well as the voices of Cornwall's past and current inhabitants, to his long peregrination. The writing is seamless and occasionally stretches to the elegant. (Mar.)