A mixture of histories - both of the Peak District and of rock-climbing. The history is quite vividly told, with imaginative recountings of clashes between the Celts and the Romans, the practice and continuity of the Old Religion, and later histories of ordinary people. The impact of industrialisation is well portrayed; the earlier accounts of pre-history and ancient history are, as I said, imaginative - perhaps slightly too imaginative! - but are based on solid scholarship from others.

The survival of the Old Religion in the Peak into contemporary times is not mentioned, but I suppose you have to know the right people to find out about that.

From the late Victorian age, the author's focus changes to the history of rock-climbing and the important role that the Peak District had in the development of that sport. This is interesting, but it shifts away from the environmental and cultural political issues that the Peak District was the focus for - the Kinder Trespass (although that is mentioned in passing) and the Peak District's status as the first National Park. Given that the book jacket specifically mentions that status, it seems a bit odd to me that the author never mentions this. Yet rock-climbing as a sport only really became possible when ordinary people were able to access the rocks thay wanted to climb, first physically through the railways that penetrated the Peak, and then legally, through the promotion of the right to wander and the designation of the Peak as a place where people could have access to landscape.

Still, the history that is there is well-researched, and the author's sources are impeccable. (His bibliography is refreshing for offering personal opinions on some of the works he consulted.) He even namechecks a book by one of my school teachers which I shall now have to track down (Doris Howe's The Story of Holbrook, which he says was published by Scarthin Books of Cromford in 1984; I suspect that might have been a reprint.)

The author is himself a climber as well as a photographer; yet there is another part of the story of climbing in the Peak which he has missed. That is the role of the Peak District as a nursery for more ambitious mountaineers. I think of the woman mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who was the first woman to ascend Everest unaided, and the first mountaineer to scale all the major north faces in the Alps in a single season; and who died on K2 in 1994. She became interested in mountaineering because rock climbing was a key feature of the outdoor pursuits programme at Belper High School, which she and I attended. Belper is on the doorstep of the Peak; the easy access afforded doubtless influenced the development of that programme and the story of the Peak as a mountaineering nursery surely deserves some mention.

I've not yet mentioned the main thing about this book - the photographs. They are stunningly good; any shortcomings that may be implied from my earlier comments are eclipsed by the visual aspect of the book. I deeply enjoyed this portrait of the landscape where I grew up. ( )