It is a very strange thing indeed. Lay out a map of Britain and something odd becomes apparent: at 1 degree 50 minutes west there is a dead straight line going true north from Stonehenge to Lindisfarne. Two of Britain's most-ancient and most-revered sites. But there is more . . . Starting in the south, the line goes dead north from Castle Ditches to old Sarum, through Stonehenge, Knap Hill and Avebury stone circles, past ancient places in Cricklade, Bibury, Notgrove and Wootton Wawen. It goes through Long Low, Thor's Cave, Mam Tor, nearby Twelve Apostles stone circle, Ilkley Roman site, The Badger stone, ancient sites in Lanchester, Eochester, Millstone Burn, Bewick Hill and all the way to finish plum on Lindisfarne Island - one of the most ancient of early Christian sites and still a retreat and monastery. But the significance of the Great North Line has been forgotten over time, and no one has ever walked the whole route before - at least not in the last 1,000 years. Robert Twigger has travelled this ancient line on foot, like a biologist walking a transect. Sticking as closely as possible to the meridian, he answers the questions raised by this most mysterious and ancient of British lines and discovers if it still has a power over us today.
Author
Robert Twigger is a British author who has been described as, 'a 19th Century adventurer trapped in the body of a 21st Century writer'. He attended Oxford University and later spent a year training at Martial Arts with the Tokyo Riot Police. He has won the Newdigate prize for poetry, the Somerset Maugham award for literature and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. In 1997, whilst on an expedition in Northern Borneo, he discovered a line of menhirs crossing into Kalimantan. In 1998 He was part of the team that caught the world's longest snake- documented in the Channel 4/National Geographic film and book Big Snake; later he was the leader of the expedition that was the first to cross Western Canada in a birchbark canoe since 1793. Most recently, in 2009-2010, he led an expedition that was the first to cross the 700 km Great Sand Sea of the Egyptian Sahara solely on foot. He has also written for newspapers and magazines such as The Daily Telegraph, Maxim and Esquire, and has published several poetry collections, including one in 2003, with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Robert has published Real Men Eat Puffer Fish (2008), a humorous but comprehensive guide to frequently overlooked but not exclusively masculine pastimes, while his latest novel Dr. Ragab's Universal Language, was published to acclaim in July 2009. Robert now lives in Cairo, a move chronicled in his book Lost Oasis. He has lead several desert expeditions with 'The Explorer School'. Robert has given lectures on the topic of 'Lifeshifting', an approach which emphasises the need to centre one's life around meaning-driven motivation. Drawing on experiences working with indigenous peoples from around the world, he has spoken on 'work tribes' and polymathy. He has also spoken on leadership. Some of these talks have been to companies such as Procter and Gamble, Maersk Shipping, SAB Miller and Oracle computing.
