Walking the Border

This travelogue about one man’s journey by foot along the border between Scotland and England blends nature, history, and politics.

In this book, Ian Crofton travels 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 the Border runs through a wild, overwhelmingly unvisited no man’s land—the sort of trackless waste perfect for keeping two belligerent peoples apart? During the course of his journey, Crofton considers a number of questions like how “natural” are borderlines? Sometimes they follow physical barriers, sometimes an arbitrary line on a map, the compromise made by some committee of distant diplomats…

Praise for Walking the Border

“There is a lot of excellent natural description in this book, alongside a number of comic encounters with humans and livestock.” —The Guardian (UK)