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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.

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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.

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