We may rarely spare much thought for the roads we travel every day. The journey to school, to the grocery shop, to work. The roads we take once in a lifetime, on holiday, on a university trip, a sacred pilgrimage. They seem to lie outside of us, beneath our feet, under a set of wheels, on a screen, mapped in red, yellow, green. Yet roads are intricately, intimately humanmade. To begin with, by a simple mark, a trace, an impression of foot on soil, stone, grass – carving out a route. They carry landscape, within, without, journeying well beyond their slated beginnings and endings; conjuring for travellers through the ages an experience – to borrow from John Muir – where going out was really going in. Rob Cowen’s The North Road lays out for us, end to end and beyond, a road well-travelled: the A1. For over 7,000 years, it has connected two frenzied capitals – London and Edinburgh – endlessly ferrying ghosts, its history encompassing that of a nation.

We begin with a dig along the A1, where roadworks to re-align it to the original Roman route have unearthed, among other archaeological finds, human bones. A skull that Cowen excavates becomes a portal, a conjuring of possibilities. For the author, “the road came out of nowhere,” at a period of splutter-ing creativity. From here though, the glimmer of an idea, a path, a “shining line leading everywhere”, and the feeling that perhaps the act of “unearthing the road was unearthing something in [him]”. After all, this is an old road, the country’s longest, tracing tracks laid down as far back as the Mesolithic period. It has transformed from prehistoric desire path to trackway, Roman road, pilgrim route, turnpike, coach road, A-road and motor-way. The oldest routes in a network are what road researchers call a ‘structural backbone’, shaping how newer roads connect and evolve.

Cowen’s book is structured as a series of journeys he under-takes along the length of the A1, on foot, and where necessary by train and car. But this is more than a travelogue and slips pleasingly between genres – psychogeography, memoir, fiction. With his first book, Skimming Stones , he explored wild edges, the minimal interstices of Nature, and we noticed that sensibility to the overlooked, the marginal. With Common Ground , he framed a sliver of landscape around his Yorkshire home as a node of human–Nature temporality, memory and resonance – a patch of ground brimming with meaning. In The North Road we see the same attentiveness to place, to the in-between, to layers hidden and unseen – though scaling up massively from local to longitudinal.

“What do we see when we look at a road?” Cowen asks. “We see us, of course. The road is human lifeline laid out.” This holds true as metaphor – we are all on the road , with birth and death as bookends, dealing with rough patches and smooth, finding our own paths. Sometimes, though, a road may quite literally bind with the story of your life – as, we discover, it does for Cowen. The A1 leads directly to his ancestors, and their lives in the 1920s in Doncaster, with an eventual, sudden departure for London. This is where Cowen’s journey begins, at London Bridge, accompanied by his friend and “foot companion”, A – and with them we walk back in time. It’s a sleight of hand that Cowen practises on his readers, this ability to imbue a moment with the weight of all its history – for the road is memory and monument, all at once. A time tunnel, if you will, that encompasses Roman imperialism, Cromwell’s England, the golden age of coaching alongside the rise of the British empire, and its fall, to the present.

Yet the present is precarious. We are constantly teetering on the edge of things, on the border to other times, other places. The moment, for example, when A and Cowen encounter a garden of remembrance with a plaque dedicated to Peter John Monkhouse, the dad of one of Cowen’s childhood friends, who died in the tragic Hatfield rail crash in 2000. This plays portal to Cowen’s youth. All these things are ever-present – his difficult younger years, wading through his parents’ divorce, drugs, restlessness and grief. Until healing begins, slowly, even as he travels the road that leads to his own past, and that of a nation, an island contending with its many fissures, geographical divides, class frictions, the yawning abyss of north and south.

Sometimes, as with all long, winding ways, there may be a digression too many, too long a stop to observe a personal experience in the author’s past. An experimentation with form that seems unnecessary. The road, I felt, was story enough, and I was sometimes impatient to step back on the A1 because the journey was so enjoyable. What I also missed, in a book that brimmed with astute political observations on capitalism, urbanisation, class and the way these affect our mobility in all senses of the word, was a consideration, even if gently, of road ecology – how life transforms for plants and animals with traffic nearby. At a length of almost 660 kilometres, what changes might the A1 have caused natural ecologies along the way? And how might it have shaped the lives of the more-than-human around it? After all, a road also serves birds, seeds, animals, water, leaves. However, The North Road powerfully reminds us that the A1 is more mirror than map, more thread than trackway – it weaves self, landscape and history.

The North Road by Rob Cowen. Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025. ISBN: 9781529152432

Janice Pariat is a storyteller of British, Portuguese and Indigenous Khasi origins. Her 2022 novel Everything the Light Touches won four fiction awards and was listed as a New Yorker Best Book. She teaches creative writing and lives in Shillong, Meghalaya.