Every river has a double life.
There is the river you can see – the tidal surge and the quiet meadow, the heron and the lock-keeper, the bridges and the barges. And there is the river beneath the river: two thousand years of human noise, submerged but never quite silent.
Roy Robson has spent a lifetime walking alongside London's Thames.
In Pilgrimage, he follows it to its source – 184 miles upstream from the Woolwich foot tunnel to a modest stone in a Gloucestershire field – with his wife Pam and their rescue dog Freya as companions, and with the whole accumulated weight of English history as his guide.
This is a book about what rivers remember. About the Vikings who rowed these waters and the navvies who dug the sewers beneath them. About Tudor queens and Frost Fair revellers and wartime sentries and lightermen who knew every inch of this river's moods.
It is also, quietly and honestly, a book about a marriage – how forty years together look when you strip away the routines and walk somewhere, one difficult mile at a time.
Warmly told, and alive to the comedy that lurks in every wrong turn and pub sign that lies about distances, Pilgrimage is a reminder that the best journeys are never really about the destination.
They are about paying attention, and who walks beside you.
There is the river you can see – the tidal surge and the quiet meadow, the heron and the lock-keeper, the bridges and the barges. And there is the river beneath the river: two thousand years of human noise, submerged but never quite silent.
Roy Robson has spent a lifetime walking alongside London's Thames.
In Pilgrimage, he follows it to its source – 184 miles upstream from the Woolwich foot tunnel to a modest stone in a Gloucestershire field – with his wife Pam and their rescue dog Freya as companions, and with the whole accumulated weight of English history as his guide.
This is a book about what rivers remember. About the Vikings who rowed these waters and the navvies who dug the sewers beneath them. About Tudor queens and Frost Fair revellers and wartime sentries and lightermen who knew every inch of this river's moods.
It is also, quietly and honestly, a book about a marriage – how forty years together look when you strip away the routines and walk somewhere, one difficult mile at a time.
Warmly told, and alive to the comedy that lurks in every wrong turn and pub sign that lies about distances, Pilgrimage is a reminder that the best journeys are never really about the destination.
They are about paying attention, and who walks beside you.
Used availability for Roy Robson's Pilgrimage