When I read a review of Rob Cowen’s The North Road in The Guardian last winter, I knew I had to read it. A study of a highway? On foot? Yes! Of course I was interested. My first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, covers similar ground (forgive the pun). I immediately ordered a copy, and in July, I finally got down to reading it. I’m happy I did.

The North Road isn’t, as I had imagined, a book about a 400-mile walk following the path of “the North Road,” a historical highway (now the A1 and its variants) which runs from London to Edinburgh and beyond. Cowen isn’t wedded to the idea of walking, although the first half of the book tells the story of a long walk from London to Nottinghamshire, partly alone and partly with a friend, an active-duty soldier, known only as A, who joins Cowen when he is on leave. The rest of the book follows the highway by car. The pandemic is one reason for that change; another is that Cowen journeys at times with very different companion, his mother. That shift in the means of travel didn’t affect my interest in the book (which is a surprise, because I can be rigid about these things), and it becomes the occasion for Cowen’s experiments in genre, which add so much to the book.

Cowen begins with a day spent volunteering at an archaeological site uncovered by an expansion of the A1 in Yorkshire. It’s impossible, he suggests, to dig anywhere in England without uncovering evidence of its history. Roman, neolithic, Bronze Age, modern–it doesn’t matter: bodies, pottery, coins, weapons, the remains of structures (particularly henges) are everywhere. The way people lived, their technologies and burial practices, means they left many traces. That’s true here as well, or at least it was. The areas of native grassland that remain unploughed are full of tipi rings, farmers often collected hundreds of arrow heads and other knapped flint objects, former buffalo jumps were the sites of centuries of bones. The difference, perhaps, is that when the grassland became fields of wheat, the tipi rings and medicine wheels were destroyed, and the bones of the buffalo were shipped away to be turned into china and fertilizer. The arrowheads often end up in boxes in local museums, separated from their context by the plough and their first settler collectors. Similar vandalism happened in England, of course. Victorian archaeologists broke into tombs; many of the stones at Avebury were deliberately shattered by clergymen who believed they were evidence of Satanic worship. But more tangible evidence of the past seems to remain in England, even before those blue medallions began to be installed on any old building where something somewhat interesting took place.

But this book isn’t just about artifacts or material culture. It’s about stories. Like me (and like other walking writers, from Matthew Anderson to Iain Sinclair), Cowen looks for evidence of the past in the pedestrian present, while also learning everything he can about the history and geography of the places he visits. While walking, he keeps an eye out for old coaching inns, since the North Road was, for much of the 18th century, a busy coach route. He tells us when he sees evidence of the road’s earlier Roman incarnation. He tracks the rise and fall of towns and villages as the road was moved or the railway passed (or didn’t pass) them by. But the stories are what make this book come alive: stories about people who grew up or lived or met their endings alongside the North Road, including Margaret Thatcher, the prizefighter Tom Molineaux, the poet John Clare, the murder victim John Barugh. And stories from Cowen’s own life, his struggle to overcome childhood trauma, and stories about his family, who lived in Doncaster (right on the road) before moving down to London. That complex, layered mix of memoir, biography, history, geography, and attention to place, as well as the stories of the difficulties of a long walk, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in such things.

And that leads to Cowen’s shifts in genre, from nonfiction to fiction, where historical evidence is missing or where he wants to get inside those stories. There are two long chapters of fiction here: one about a contemporary (more or less) travelling IT support person, leading a lonely life in hotels and on the motorway, and the other about a woman trying to escape William the Conqueror’s soldiers during the Harrying of the North, a scorched-earth campaign against the Danes and Anglo-Saxons, mostly in Yorkshire, who were rebelling against his rule after the Norman Conquest. To call that campaign “ethnic cleansing” might be anachronistic, but from Cowen’s account, it seems accurate. I don’t know how much his fictional version of events stacks up against the historical record, or if there is much of a historical record of what it was like to be a victim of the Harrying, since a) few of those people could write and b) any documents would’ve been burned along with their homes, but the narrative is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. In that way, The North Road asks us to think about the way fiction and nonfiction blur together, the way that our knowledge is partial, the way that our memories are constructions.

I was amazed by The North Road, and I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s other books (nonfiction and poetry). I’m not tempted, though, to follow in his footsteps and try to walk from London to Doncaster (or wherever he stopped), mostly because I don’t have the courage for that much trespassing and wild camping (walking beside highways in the UK is more than unpleasant–it’s suicidal, since there are no shoulders). I’m glad he did it, though, and delighted that he wrote this book.