Books: How Awful, How Good

A WALK THROUGH BRITAIN by John Hillaby. 278 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

John Hillaby is one of those slightly cracked Englishmen who insist on doing something remarkable largely in order to write a delightful book about how awful it was. At the age of 50, and more out of curiosity than a sense of competition ("For me the question was not whether it could be done, but whether I could do it"), he undertook a 1,100-mile hike from one end of Britain to the other. In the course of it, he managed to be fogbound on Dartmoor, musclebound in Bristol and sodden in Somerset. He was rained upon almost everywhere (though not, oddly, at a place in Scotland called Hill of Drip), making clear why one of the few Gaelic words he picked up en route was fliuch. It is pronounced, he says, "floo-chh" and it means "wet."

Hillaby is a traveler and science writer. Apart from his legs, his greatest strength lies in a command of natural science and history, and a dry, witty style. He blends sharp observation of topography, birds and beasts with an unusual feeling for the ancient human chronicle of a land inhabited for thousands of years. On a vast British army artillery range in Redesdale, for instance, he pointed out to a brigadier that Romans had operated large catapults in exactly the same spot 1,600 years earlier.

Hillaby is, in fact, less a misfortune hunter than a celebrator of individuality. Slogging along at a rate of 20 miles or so a day, he achieved an extraordinary vision of a piebald Britain steadfastly conserving regional idiosyncrasies. He found Scottish Lowlanders employing litigation as a modern substitute for clan feuds, Welshmen thinking more about "minstrels, ash trees and scansion" than anything else, Cornish gypsies habitually "poovin' the grays" (pasturing their horses at night in somebody else's field). At the Hare and Hounds in Chip-shop, Devon, the customers like to sing hymns while they drink, and one night, they moved over to the church and helped out the choir. "A good time was had by all," the pub keeper told Hillaby, "including, I imagine, the Lord." After so much local color, the author was only mildly disappointed to discover on finally reaching John o' Groat's that the photographic concession there was owned by the same man as at Land's End.