Ring the Hill

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.

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com