#BlogTour-‘Ring The Hill’ by Tom Cox

About the book…

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for the tour invite and Unbound for my gifted review copy of ‘Ring The Hill’ by Tom Cox which is available from 03/10/2019 in hardback format.

A hill is not a mountain. You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked `Quite A Lot Of Hills’ where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are.

Ring the Hill is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes a northern hill, a hill that never ends and the smallest hill in England. Each chapter takes a type of hill – whether it’s a knoll, cap, cliff, tor or even a mere bump – as a starting point for one of Tom’s characteristically unpredictable and wide-ranging explorations.

Tom’s lyrical, candid prose roams from an intimate relationship with a particular cove on the south coast, to meditations on his great-grandmother and a lesson on what goes into the mapping of hills themselves. Because a good walk in the hills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might lead.

When I read the title of ‘Ring The Hill’,my mind was immediately cast back to my childhood, and a sense a nostalgia for the fairy rings me and my friends would leave in the hope of being able to see one. I imagined a hill -Wales has plenty of them to ring!-being swathed with fairy rings and flowers, and decorative stones.

Lovingly decorated with his traditional lino cut illustrations of hares on the end papers and at the start of chapters, this is a superb companion piece to 21st Century Yokel. Both are heady mixtures of rambling thoughts, folktales and memories which anyone familiar with Tom’s writing style on Twitter will immediately recognise.

Basically, if you love his witty, pithy, notebook obsessed posts and his clear and frank adoration of his mum, Shirley, you will not only love this book, it will help you look at the world with new eyes. This is especially pertinent as ‘Ring The Hill’ is published on the cusp of autumn-for my money, the best season!-and Tom’s peripatetic sojourns are driven by genetics and wanderlust combined with infectious love of the countryside is as familair as your favourite pair of walking boots.

I found it immensely satisfying as I discovered how much there is to love about Somerset, where geographical features are blended with hostorical facts giving them a relevance to anyone who has been there, or, like me, plans to one day. The joy of map reading-the paper kind, the ones which geography teachers took at least one lesson to teach us how to fold properly- comes rushing back and made me think about a)how we outsource our knowledge to the internet and sat navs as well as b)digging the only map we have in the house out. It led me down a rabbit hole of searching maps up online and buying a book on the origins of monsters on sea maps but I digress.

What Tom does so well is talk to you liek a friend. He is not lecturing, hectoring or proselytising, he is showing in his clear, simple enthusiastic text, this is what I love and this is why. He is not giving you lists of things you must buy in order to travel and explore, he is expressing his love for the sheer joy of setting out walking, sometimes with no more than a vague notion of where he is going.

”It was if many of the complexities of my life had floated away , and I was realising my essential core being for the first time,which was just a transient collection of experiences and opinions and hopes,blundering along to the next destination, maybe picking a few more up along the way.”

Starting in Glastonbury and moving on to Devon, The Peak District ,Dartmoor, Burnham On Sea and ending in Dartington, this is a journey unlike any other. Folkloric at the same time as becoming part of the tales, wandering and yet also being found, this is a loveletter to the English countryside and the power of nature , as well as man’s relationship with it.

I went on such a journey reading this, it was such a pleasure to roam far beyond the boundaries of the castles and the shorelines that I know so well and hills that stand guard on every horizon, no matter where in our town you stand.

If anyone ever said ‘Run for the hills!’ people around her would say ”Which ones do you want us to head for, butt?”

Not strictly speaking all about hills, this is wryly humorous and engagingly witty read that I would recommend to readers of Horatio Clare  and Jessica J Lee

About the author…

Tom Cox lives in Devon. A one-time music journalist he is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling ‘The Good, the Bad and the Furry’and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted ‘‘Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia’. ‘‘Help the Witch’, a collection of folk ghost stories, was published in October 2018.

Twitter @cox_tom

  @unbounders

              @annecater

Links-http://tom-cox.com/