The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre
By Madeleine Bunting
Granta £18.99, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

On those grim Tuesdays when you’ve endured an eruption of murderous road rage on the Hammersmith roundabout; when credit crunchery snaps at your heels and you’ve heard one too many damply mediocre politicians barking disingenuously on the Today programme, the temptation to flee into the heart of some sempiternal Angleterre profonde, where gnats forever hum on a June afternoon, willow begs for the smack of leather, and draught bitter foams at the tankard’s brim, becomes well nigh irresistible. Take me to that clottedcreamerycowpatty-dandelionandburdock place, you moan, for pity’s sake, cover me in cow parsley.

Madeleine Bunting, author and Guardian columnist, knows all about that kind of bucolic fantasy, which endures, because it’s not entirely fictitious. There’s a whole 20th-century literature of the craving for a prelapsarian Albion, of which Orwell’s Coming Up for Air is the most brutal; a craving for a Britain uncontaminated by the bypass lay-by and the half-timbered semi.

Bunting is astute about this welly welling in the urban culture; the Laura Ashley prettification of post-industrial pain. The Plot is not another contribution to the romantic fabulism of England, however, but a dig through a more recalcitrant memory-landscape – in Bunting’s case, the moors of north Yorkshire. Her clear-eyed freedom from sentimentality, not least about herself and her family history, make this beautifully written, moving book more, not less, passionate, the writing closer to Hardy than to Housman.

The acre at Scotch Corner, up in the Hambleton Hills, was described by Daniel Defoe in the 1720s as “black, ill-looking”. In every sense it is a family plot as well as a patch of soil. And therein lies the force of Bunting’s story. Time-tripping through a particular geography is an English genre done well – from Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Bruce Chatwin to Patrick Wright, or Colin Thubron and Peter Ackroyd. But Bunting is hunting for something, or rather someone, other than a close Ordnance Survey reading.

She is stalking her father, sculptor John Bunting, whose gnarly Catholic romanticism looms over The Plot, both the land and the family tale, like the escarpment throwing dolorous shadow on the vale beneath. Within the single acre, along with the chapel and stone hut that her father built on it, are embedded memories, traditions, fables and habits that Bunting tenderly but resolutely excavates.

She’s like the most patient archaeologist, delicately sieving from loam and clay her own memories of her father; the shared chronicles of the country; the long social and natural history of its topography. All is in pursuit of an answer to one question, lying like an aching thorn buried in her flesh, “Why did he take us there?” Or, “What was so wrong with Whetstone anyway?”

The answer, threaded through Bunting’s narrative and pulled together into a grippingly readable yarn by its end, is, inevitably, Paradise Lost. The Buntings were “tea kings” in the City who made and then lost a fortune, but not before they had given the author’s father a brief taste of grandeur. Embittered by having to live in Friern Barnet in London, he wanted nothing more to do with the “fickle mistress” capitalism, and a boyhood at the Yorkshire Catholic public school of Ampleforth let him visualise a life spent amid a different England. On a school hike to Gormire Lake on the moors, in the week of D-Day, he came across the acre, at Scotch Corner, which – as so often in the needy spirituality of the Anglo-Catholic imagination – came to represent not just so much bramble, heather and granite but “solid” England: drenched with faith as well as drizzle. Around him were its poignant ruins – Cistercian abbeys and a grace John Bunting believed adhered to shepherds, farmers and craftsmen. We have been here before, of course, in an imagined England of righteous labour, in the company of Pugin, Carlyle and Ruskin. But the unoriginality of the yearning does not make it any less affecting in the daughter’s recounting.

Madeleine Bunting’s multidimensional chronicle is among the very best pieces of non-fiction to have been published in a long while about what it is like to be English. What makes it so is that her father was fixated with his patch of land and the gloomy chapel he turned into a war memorial, complete with a figure of a dead soldier set into the floor.

But Bunting allows her own story to be surrounded with that of Britain’s through the centuries. Her father, she writes, “loved company”, albeit selectively, for he was also monkish, Heathcliffean and unforgiving. But his daughter is gregariously open to the many populations of her plot of land and walks the reader through the centuries to make their acquaintance.

Iron age burial mounds let her write about the competitive Victorian clergymen who were its first archaeologists; tracks over the hills about the Scottish cattle drovers who followed their herds so slowly that they could knit stockings as they walked. And if you have ever had a thing about fleece and lanolin, this is the book for you, since Bunting is sheep-struck. She gets up close to the indifferent grazers and stares into “the brilliant gold of their irises offsetting the astonishing black rectangular pupils”. There’s nothing about the woolly bleaters she doesn’t know or love, and in her pages they become a colossal force in English history: heroic, industrious and multipurpose – not just walking wool and meat, but dung, tallow and bones that have been fashioned into a peculiar kind of piping flute.

Are all these story-strands – personal, familial, topographical and national – resolved by the conclusion of the book? No, for Bunting is too honest a writer to play her endgame that neatly. She goes aloft in a much-postponed glider flight, expecting revelation. But she gets only aerial miniaturisation. Having lived with Scotch Corner and its memories, she walks out on them at the end; a brother takes over their custody.

“Once again I am not welcome,” she writes, as she returns to the laptop in Hackney. And having based the book on the idea that return to roots will heal the wounds of family pain, and the dull ache of cultural drift and ecological degradation, she finds at the end, that “belonging” isn’t to be confused with possession, nor with a single spot on the face of the earth. If we’re lucky, we get to have many plots.

Simon Schama is a contributing editor of the FT and author of ‘The American Future: A History’ (Bodley Head)