In YORKSHIRE , Richard Morris looks beyond stereotypes, exploring interactions between landscape, language, and memory. The county is one of Europe's most geologically varied areas - a realm where mountain, plain, coast, chalk hills, wetland and heath lie close, often within sight of each other. Morris considers how we discover Yorkshire, whether as modern travellers, through eyes of artists (J. M. W. Turner, William Sawrey Gilpin, William Callow, Henry Moore) or writers' imaginations (Michael Drayton, Winifred Holtby, J.B. Priestley, Ted Hughes).

We travel to strange places, like the county's netherworld of caves, mines and tunnels, and confront dark subjects such as the part played by Whitby and Hull in the emptying of Arctic seas and shores of whales and bears. In contrarian spirit, Morris even finds Robin Hood to have been a Yorkshireman. YORKSHIRE explore the tumultuous history of God's Own County and asks why it has so often been to the fore in times of conflict or tension (think Wars of the Roses, Northern Rising, Civil War, Cold War, the miners' strike of 1984). Outward-lookingness is a repeating theme. Eighteen centuries ago a province of the Roman Empire was governed from York; in the Viking age a trading axis ran from Dublin through the kingdom of York to the Baltic, along Russian rivers to Byzantium and Baghdad. Both in area and population Yorkshire today is larger than many member countries of the UN, yet remains just an English county. As Richard Morris reveals in this dazzlingly wide-ranging and lyrical history, Yorkshire has always been both a region with a distinct identity inside Britain and a fulcrum in the world.