Ten years after walking across Central Asia & through Afghanistan, Rory Stewart returns to Britain. He walks a thousand miles, crossing & recrossing the English-Scottish Border. A referendum is coming on whether Scotland will become independent country; he is a Scot living in Engl&, & the Member of Parliament for the only constituency with ` Border` in its name. He paces back & forth between his family house in Scotland & his own home in Cumbria. He discovers that, buried beneath England & Scotl&, is another country, now lost, a Middleland with its own history, its own civilisation: a vanished kingdom. Stewart sleeps on mountain ridges & in housing estates, in motels & in farmhouses. Following lines of neolithic standing stones & the wilderness created by farming subsidies; wading through floods & ruined fields, he traces Hadrian`s Wall with soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan. He interviews Buddhist & Christian monks, investigates arson attacks & heritage websites, & tries to get to grips with his tartan-clad father. His book becomes a history of the Middlel&, or ” The Marches”, what is now the frontier zone between two contemporary nations. Britain, he argues, is an island whose natural boundaries are the sea, a nation split by a colonial empire that drew a line on a map, separating tribes & families. The book is defined by a profound love of landscape, & walking, an unusual erudition, & an instinct for the most eccentric local histories. It draws on contemporary politics, & long years working in rural Asia, & on troubled borders, to illuminate the pattern of forgetting & remembrance that makes a very modern border & a very modern nationalism.