The English countryside has been divided into numerous districts, based on everything from soil type, landuse, tourist features, history, etc., so their distinctions are sometimes difficult to understand. This book contains dozens of short essays, one per area, and most of the essays are very interesting.However, I found the book as a whole extremely difficult to use because there is no coordination between the maps at each end of the book, showing and numbering each land use area, and the text or the smaller detailed maps included with each short essay. Those essays, with area maps for each, are impossible to relate to other areas of the country using the end-page maps. It is very frustrating to try to find specific areas of interest to the reader, and then to further find adjacent areas, or similar areas of interest.
The essays are interesting as discreet little descriptions of an area in England, but as a whole, I find the book just a series of essays. The index is sketchy; so many, many towns mentioned in the essays, or of independent interest to the reader, aren't in the index. And, believe it or not, with the detailed maps containing numbered areas, in front and back, absolutely no use is made of those numbers in the essays, either in the text or individuals maps! So when you read an essay that interests the reader, you can't find that area in the end-paper maps, so you can't relate essays to the larger, overall picture of England.
And, if for further example, you read of an area, and you want to read about a neighboring area, there is no way to look up anything and just turn to it. All you can do is start thumbing through the whole book, or keep reading at length, hoping you can put together areas of interest on your own.
This book needs a considerably better index, and the absence of a relationship between the individual essays and the larger maps showing numbered areas is an astounding failure. Some editor did a terrible job of making this book readable and useable in relationship to an interest in England.
I have detailed AA maps of English roads and attractions, and even with those, this book was difficult to use in relationship to actual places to visit.
I found the book terribly uncoordinated, and the relationship between the maps and essays, and the overall maps of England, is non-existent.
That said, the individual essays are interesting, and there are numerous good photos of places, but it is nearly impossible to relate individual efforts to the whole.
With this book, I keep thinking of those old, hackneyed phrases: "close, but no cigar," "so near, yet so far," etc., but they are quite apt in this case. A better index and some use of the areas numbered in the maps of England with each essay would have turned this book into a winner. It just doesn't make it.
