<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K3L4M3" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Books

An alternative map of Britain: caves, canals, megaliths and ley lines

A review of Britannia Obscura by Joanna Parker reveals a Britain — mostly subterranean — we scarcely knew existed

6 December 2014

9:00 AM

6 December 2014

9:00 AM

Britannia Obscura: Mapping Hidden Britain Joanne Parker

Cape, pp.224, £16.99, ISBN: 9780224102025

Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as our own faces; there is only one definitive map, surely? Not according to Joanne Parker, whose Britannia Obscura aims to tease out less corporeal cartography. Hers are not quite ‘maps of the mind’, for they exist as truly as a crisp new Ordnance Survey, but they are largely out of sight: above us, below us or otherwise in the shadows.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Black Friday sale

Subscribe today and get 10 weeks of The Spectator Australia for just $1

  • Unlimited access to spectator.com.au and app
  • The weekly edition on the Spectator Australia app
  • Spectator podcasts and newsletters
  • Full access to spectator.co.uk
Or

Unlock this article

REGISTER

Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £13.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Mike Parker is the author of Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge and the Ordnance Survey.

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.


Comments

Black Friday sale

Subscribe today and get 10 weeks of The Spectator Australia for just $1

Already a subscriber? Log in

Close