Take a historic trip down the A1 with this brilliant book

Telegraph

29-03-2025

'The road' has ensnared the imagination of storytellers since writing began. The oldest story ever written tells of the travels of Gilgamesh; Homer's Odyssey reunites wandering father and son; in The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan describes the journey of a soul. Roads are magical things. It can be no surprise, then, that the Great North Road – otherwise known as the A1 – has captured the imagination of Rob Cowen in a book which has been years in the writing.
Ten years ago Cowen published the original and generically hybrid Common Ground, about his exploration of the edgelands around his new Yorkshire home. The North Road also begins in Yorkshire, with Cowen housebound with the arrival of a new baby. Exhausted by sleepless nights and bone-deep tiredness, Cowen is frustrated by his inability to write. When his father comes to visit, he suggests Cowen visit the nearby earthworks at Bainesse where 12 miles of the A1 are being upgraded. Cowen sets off, trowel in hand. He wonders whether there'll be a story in it.
What he finds is a body, buried in mud, which has lain undisturbed for perhaps 1600 years in 'a treasure trove for the archaeologist; a minefield for the road builder'. The team of archaeologists, working ahead of the diggers, have unearthed what appears to be a Roman cemetery. But this is only a fragment of what lies beneath the surface: among the 'emotive detritus', there's 'pots, combs, coins, bones, bits of cavalry harness, children's toys, spearheads, hammers, keys and lucky charms'.
For Cowen, what emerged that day was both a creative awakening and a fascination for the road itself. And when an inscription on an old family photograph reveals that Cowen's great grandfather, a self-made man with the restless energy and shifting fortunes of a Dickensian hero, had once lived on the Great North Road, his subject becomes apparent. By the end of his life, Cowen's great-grandfather had gone south, enjoying the genteel delights of Hampstead village (and in his sociable way, often in the company of what was then the world's highest-paid movie star, Elizabeth Taylor, and her husband, Richard Burton). Cowen sets himself the task of travelling, often on foot, the entire length of the Great North Road from London to Edinburgh while at the same time uncovering what he can of the life of his entrepreneurial great-grandfather.
But The North Road isn't just a family history. Cowen is interested in every aspect of the road: what lies beneath the surface; who built it and when; who lived alongside it; marched to battle along it; was hanged by it; who worshipped at its wayside shrines. Cowen slips with ease from traveller to historian, naturalist to ghost hunter. At times he slips into fiction, giving voice to the dead who mark his way, and, at one point, to the genius loci of an abandoned pub: 'I watch the maid hurrying down the passage and the yarrow, ragwort and elder colonise the car park. I see the boy with a pikestaff too big for his hands walk past the door with his eager face. I hear the fiddlers and the horses. Rooms disappear; the walls pour with rain. My voice is the sighing of collapsing floors.'
There's also, at times, a tonal and visual relationship to TS Eliot 's The Four Quartets, felt in Cowen's awareness of the cyclical nature of things – buildings go up, come down; folk are born, pray, make love and are buried; war follows peace and peace follows war. The road becomes an apt metaphor for our living and dying, as well as the imprints we leave for those who follow. And as a reader we come to feel, with Cowen, 'the way the road can shift set patterns and our ways of thinking and being. The way it seems to erase and remake who we are.' This is an astonishing book in its scope and vitality. It's one to relish and revisit – not least because at its heart is an exuberant love song to both the living and the dead.
The North Road is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £22. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books