Travel writing, adventure, & guide books
Reviews
A fascinating and charming reverie on the impermanence of our Island’s islands'
Tony Robinson, star of Blackadder and Time Team
About the Book
Greece has its sun-soaked Cyclades and Dodecanese; Scotland its Northern Isles and rain-drenched Hebrides and Ireland the Arans and Skelligs.
And what has England got? The isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Wight and Dogs, Mersea, Brownsea, Two Tree and Rat.
But there are also wilder, rockier places – Lundy, the Scillies, Holy Island, the Farnes. These islands and their inhabitants not only cast varied lights on the mainland, they also possess their own peculiar stories: the Barbary slavers who once occupied Lundy; the ex-major who seized a wartime fort in the North Sea and declared himself Prince of Sealand; the wrecked munitions ship off the Isle of Sheppey that one day might unleash an unimaginable cataclysm, and much more besides. He also describes his encounters with island wildlife, from puffins to porpoises, and recounts the varied ways in which England’s islands have been formed, and how they are constantly changing.
The Author
Ian Crofton
Ian Crofton has written a wide range of non-fiction books, including a number that look at the quirkier aspects of history and other subjects, including History without the Boring Bits, Science Without the Boring Bits, and A Curious History of Food and Drink. Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the University of Sussex before working as an editor at Collins in Glasgow. He now works freelance.You may also like…
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Hardback | Pub: 06 Jun 2019£12.99As an antidote to more sober accounts of Scotland’s history, Ian Crofon offers a colourful chronology of the eccentric, the infamous, the bawdy, the horrific and the hilarious people and events that have spattered across the pages of our...
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Paperback | Pub: 16 Jul 2015£9.99
In this book Ian Crofton makes a journey on foot from Gretna Green in the southwest to Berwick in the northeast, following as close as possible the Anglo-Scottish Border as it has been fixed since the union of the crowns in 1603. Much of the line of...
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Hardback | Pub: 21 May 2020£14.99Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020 There are strange relics hidden across Scotland’s landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are...
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Hardback | Pub: 08 Oct 2020£20.00Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland’s Atlantic shore. These ‘white martyrs’ sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray and move...
