Diana Athill
LORE OF THE LAND
The Plot: A Biography of an Enlglish Acre
By Madeleine Bunting (Granta Books 304pp £18.99)

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This fine book offers so much that it asks to be reread almost at once. Its purpose sounds simple: to portray a place, and thus to help its author to understand her difficult father, whose life was bound up with that place. But simple it is not. Madeleine Bunting undertook her portrayal with such a powerful combination of curiosity, passion, imagination, sense of history and clear sight that she has uncovered layer after layer of her subject, much of it beautiful, much astonishing, some infuriating, some deeply disturbing, all gripping. It seems unlikely that pondering an acre of ground on the edge of the North York Moors could lead into such a variety of themes, but it does, and every one of them convinces and enlightens.

Her father bought the plot and built a chapel on it with his own hands. He was a sculptor, a Catholic, and above all a romantic inspired by men such as William Morris and Eric Gill to a faith in what he believed to be medieval values, which poisoned modern life for him. He brought his wife and children to Yorkshire in order to serve those values, without deigning to share his inspiration with them, which made him hard to live with. His daughter used to find the plot 'a place full of dread and fear' and for several decades it haunted her as 'a monument to failed dreams', even though it retained an inexplicable significance for her. In this book, with a generosity amounting to tenderness, she explores what it meant to her father, in spite of understanding how misguided, in many ways, his romanticism was.

The plot lies smack in the middle of a site that was important as far back, perhaps, as Neolithic times: an ancient drovers' route ran through it. I did not expect to be gripped by the history of how cattle were moved south from Scotland, sometimes as far as London, but I was: just as I was unexpectedly riveted by Bunting's chapter on moorland sheep. She is a writer more interested in what she has to say than in her way of saying it, but who happens to be gifted with great powers of expression, and this makes her an eye-opener. The drovers, the sheep - and then the Cistercians! Against almost unimaginable odds they built Byland Abbey, the ruins of which stand a few miles from the plot, and the ways in which they shaped the landscape in the twelfth century are still discernible. Bunting slightly disappointed me by not addressing the question of how the people whose fiercely austere unworldliness she evokes so brilliantly ended up becoming so rich; but she clearly demonstrates their influence on both the land and her father.

Everything on which she touches, from the many varieties of moth that flit about the plot to the Battle of Byland, fought in its neighbourhood, in which Robert the Bruce defeated and humiliated Edward II of England, becomes vivid and adds to one's understanding of this place. Horrible plantations of conifers have submerged much of the moors and now surround the plot. Bunting makes no bones about how deplorable they are, but I know now exactly why they came about; and on the question of whether the shooting lobby is right in claiming that its 'management' of grouse keeps the moors going, I can now see the pros and cons of the matter. The flexibility of her style is extraordinary, as she moves smoothly from a shimmering evocation of harebells in grass or cloud shadows moving over a distant view, to an acute analysis of the economic pressures behind events. She concludes by considering something relevant to all of rural Britain: the desperate plight of the plot's neighbouring farmers, which half accentuates sympathy with her father's yearning for a past that never was, while half emphasising its hopeless inadequacy.

In one way only did Madeleine Bunting fail quite to win me over, and that concerns something central to her book. I was genuinely moved by her final understanding and acceptance of her father's excessive romanticism, but was unable to enter it myself, to shake off my own impatience with it. That ought to have been crucial, but was not. It was probably my failing, not hers, and anyway, in her biography of the plot she has not just made the understanding of that particular place so important, but also the relation of place to person, everywhere. She knows it in a way that is original and profound, and that will surely mean much to many readers.

DIANA ATHILL is the author of 'Somewhere Towards the End', which won the Costa Book Award for biography this year. 'Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill' is published this month by Granta Books.