Holloway

The first pronounced rise in the ridge is succeeded by Oldgate Nick: there isn't even a footpath crossing, but it is recognisable as a holloway. Here crossed a saltway from Cheshire rising from 5altersford Hall in the upper Todd valley

Well, I see the road before me; sometimes I can see a bit further because I'm standing on a hill, sometimes I'm at the bottom of a holloway and have no idea even what lies on the other side of the hedge.

I enjoyed very much last week walking down that sunken track between Symondsbury and North Chideock--is that what one would call a 'holloway'?

In different regions they go by different names — bostels, grundles, shutes — but are all holloways. Of course, few are in use now. They are too narrow and too slow to suit modern travel. But they are also too deep to be filled in and farmed over

Six years later, after Roger Deakin's early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape.