By Dominic Green

Fortunes are sought in cities, but meaning is found in the country. Shakespeare made it in London, but in his plays the country is where we learn the truth about who we are. Britain has minimal space but history everywhere. I grew up in Kings Langley, a village northwest of London. The farmers turned up Neolithic flints. The Roman theater of Verulamium was a short drive away. My preschool was built over the cellar of the medieval palace where Shakespeare set a scene in "Richard II." Downhill is the Grand Union Canal, once the industrial artery linking London and Birmingham. Drive five minutes toward London and you'll find an airfield that became a Rolls-Royce factory and is now a Warner Bros. complex.

Graham Robb's "The Discovery of Britain" is a magnificently personal and perspicacious guide through his homeland. "In every age and generation," Mr. Robb writes, "there is another Britain to rediscover." Britain is a "defiant but friable little nation floating off the edge of a continent" that itself is "an appendix of Asia." The peoples of the British Isles, Mr. Robb notes, are joined by geography but divided by history and language into two sovereign states, several little nations and one big one.

Britain, as Mr. Robb shows, is a land of deep continuity amid deep division. Agriculture in its "non-competitive, kitchen-garden forms," he writes, arrived around 4000 B.C. It continued in both domestic and competitive forms with the help of the wheelbarrow, which arrived in the Middle Ages, presumably along with feudalism. Houses and a "polished greenstone axe" dating to around 3800 B.C. have been excavated at Horton, west of London. Much later, the one-time Horton resident John Milton (1608-74) evoked the village's "aged oaks" and "enclosure green." Horton now lies in the shadow of Heathrow Airport. Earlier enclosures had primed the English for urbanization by concentrating land ownership. There is never enough land in England. But you're never too far from the sea.

The modern web of highways and railways radiates from London, and political priorities pit the prosperous south against the postindustrial north, but these are only two among several mental maps. Drive up the A34 road from Alfred the Great's capital at Winchester to Oxford and you trace the forgotten spine of an older England, with stretches stiffened by Roman roads. As Mr. Robb showed in "The Discovery of France" (2007), the Romans often built upon older Iron Age trackways. He argues that Ptolemy's map of Britain from the second century A.D. was a "British wonder of the ancient world." When Mr. Robb converted Ptolemy's 11-to-20 ratio to a 4-to-3 ratio derived from "the angle of the rising sun of the summer solstice in southern England," the "strangely well-oiled doors of a new Old World opened up," revealing the map of the pre-Roman isles.

The north appears as a distinct region that was "at the cutting edge of Western science and technology" millennia before it birthed the Industrial Revolution. The Romans militarized England and Wales, and they built a wall to keep the Scots out, but the Romanized regions, Mr. Robb writes, accounted for only "one-quarter of the island of Great Britain" and were concentrated in the balmy south. When the Romans left, Anglo-Saxon place names replaced Celtic ones, but geneticists estimate that in the parts of England closest to Germany, only about 10% of the population were Anglo-Saxon.

The current north-south divide is marked by accents and dialects. (You eat "tea" up north but "dinner" down south.) Mr. Robb's excellent maps expose their geological foundation: the limestone belt that bisects England from the upper right to the lower left. A counterfrontier runs from the lower right to the upper left, beyond which the Danish place names left by the Vikings peter out. The island is crosshatched with invisible but palpable frontiers. Norman invaders mounted a French vocabulary on a Germanic chassis to create Middle English, but the old survived amid the new. The skyscrapers of the City of London rest on a medieval street layout.

Mr. Robb is of Scottish descent. His father had worked in Manchester and the industrial Black Country ("a giant scrapyard of offensively useless junk") before the family moved to Worcestershire. The nearest village, Powick, had "one pub for every two hundred and fifty-eight adult inhabitants." He was educated into the "depths of English obliviousness" -- the traditional history in which first the Romans and then the English subjugate the Celts and civilize them out of existence -- then worked as a student teacher in a "graceless" slum in east London. His rejection of England's imperial mythology is Romantic in its passion for philology and topology. Searching out the echoes of the Celtic foundation, Mr. Robb expresses the current mood of the isles and Western Europe more broadly.

Mr. Robb is no Little Islander, in either Scottish or English form. He sees in Westminster a culture of bribes, nepotism and lies -- a revival of Georgian "venality." Like a Romanized Celt left stranded in the Dark Ages, he accuses members of the Conservative and Reform U.K. parties of trashing their inheritance: a "loutish chipping away at the pillars of democracy." Still, his cultural politics accords with the European reaction. Identity politics and micronationalism are responses to the failure of centralized states. The Scots resent London as the Catalans resent Madrid. The Irish distrust the English, and the English distrust the French. These moods are the limestone belts of politics. Mr. Robb's attunement makes him a master geographer of the oldest and newest forms of life on a "sodden, self-aggrandizing island outpost."

--Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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January 23, 2026 11:09 ET (16:09 GMT)

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