The North Road, a journey through history, people, place and time

Speaker: Rob Cowen, poet, nature and travel writer

The North Road, the A1, is Britain’s primary road – a 400-mile arterial link that has run like a backbone through the country between London and Edinburgh for the last 2000 years.  It’s a multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway.  The discovery of a skull during a dig for Roman remains within earshot of the roar of the road’s traffic sent Rob Cowen digging through layers of the road’s history and his sense of who he is. Weaving his own histories and memories with the landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves.

Rob Cowen is an award-winning poet, nature and travel writer. Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground, was shortlisted for the Wainwright, Portico and Richard Jefferies Society prizes and voted one of Britain’s favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll. The Heeding, his sequence of thirty-five poems, was the best-selling debut poetry book published in 2021. The North Road was published earlier this year. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph and written essays and radio programmes for the BBC.

Attkins Memorial Lecture   

Members: Free, Online or Victoria Hall
Non-Members: £10, Online or Victoria Hall. To attend in person, please pay on the door
Please book, for online link only, by 1pm on the day of the event

Please join us for a drink in the Members’ Room after the lecture