This book offers an enchanting visual glossary of the British landscape: photographs & stories which take the reader from the waterlogged fens to the white sands of the Western Isles. ` Out...over the hill & then down the dip & through some lumpy bits.` This was how Dominick Tyler used to describe the places he roamed during his childhood in rural Cornwall. Vague generalities were good enough then, but later he felt a more precise, more detailed language must exist, precisely because he needed it to do what people must have needed it to do for millennia: give directions, tell a story or find a place. & so he began collecting words for landscape features, words like jackstraw, zawn, clitter & cowbelly, shivver & swag, tolmen & tor. Words that are as varied, rich & poetic as the landscapes they describe. Many of these words for our landscape are falling into obscurity, some endure only by haunting place-names & old maps. Here Dominick Tyler gathers them into an enchanting visual glossary of the British landscape. On facing pages are photographs & stories touching on geology, literature, topography, folklore & a time when our ancestors read the lines on the land as fluently as text. Taking us from the waterlogged fens to the whitesands of the Western Isles, this full-colour book is a rare delight.