Channel Short: From White Cliffs to Land's End by Tom Fort - book review: Fascinating coastline. Can't stop, must dash

You want to feel in safe hands when you start reading. You want a confident author with a good story to tell.

What you don’t want is to be told that the book which costs 15 quid in hardback is an offcut, the leftover journey from a television series that was proposed but never commissioned. A consolation prize from the author to himself. That is not a promising start.

However, the English Channel and the people who live along it is a great subject. I know this because I am one of them. Flushed with the success of his book on the A303, Fort set out to cycle from Dover to Land’s End, and he starts with an accurate description of us coastal types.

“For those who live there, the whole point is the bad weather with the good, the richness in variation, the endless change in mood, colour and texture. They tend to be not so interested in the blatant pleasures of the summer season. They wait for the transients to depart to reclaim their kingdom.”

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Absolutely right; but I am afraid that is as right as this book ever gets. It soon becomes clear that Fort prefers to cycle and read than meet people. He exchanges fragments of conversation but seldom reveals truths or even names.

“I talked to a lady of mature years,” he says typically, in Bexhill. She tells him it is quiet after the noise of Belfast, but he doesn’t ask about that. Nor does he do any more than mention that Eddie Izzard was raised and John Logie Baird died here. Bexhill is having a renaissance driven by the De La Warr pavilion but Fort completely misses that in his hurry to drop names and move on. He learns nothing. It is laughable at first, then immensely frustrating.

I was looking forward to learning about places I know through the eyes of an outames sider, but instead Fort gives us Wikipedia with a view. Or sometimes without one. He refuses to get off his bike and walk the path over the hills of the Seven Sisters, missing one of the most glorious landscapes in England, instead choosing to moan about the gate and move inland.

“I was too cross to appreciate whatever charms Seaford may possess,” he says, and by now the feeling is mutual. The book picks up briefly when he writes more personally about Roedean school, where his mother was headmistress; but then it’s back to tales from history as Fort whizzes along, barely stopping long enough to get a feel for what he is looking at. “Cornwall is not like Devon,” he tells us, dizzyingly. What great television this would have made.

It is not too much of a spoiler to say that Fort does make it to Land’s End, where he eats a bad cream tea and thinks about his journey. “I had not solved any great mysteries nor uncovered any startling truths. I had seen much and learned much, but I was sure I had overlooked plenty as well.”

Too right. There are some interesting facts and diverting stories in here but overall, a maddening sense of a glorious vista being missed.

‘Is God Still An Englishman? How Britain lost its faith but found new soul’ by Cole Moreton is published by Abacus.

Simon & Schuster £14.99