A walk through Wales

In this newest of his engaging travel accounts, British New Yorker writer Bailey ( The Outer Banks ) extends an invitation to join him on a three-week-long, cross-country ramble in spring from the Welsh capital, Cardiff, to Bangor on the north coast. Enhanced by relevant, never pedantic, lore, his account surveys the singular character of this history- and legend-rich land of Roman forts, Norman castles and medieval cathedrals as he hikes along old Roman roads and drovers' trails, up hills and fog-bound peaks, across former coal mining valleys and towns, and as he skirts bogs and rivers. On the road and in pubs, inns and bed-and-board lodgings, Bailey encounters sheep farmers and shearers, a printer turned explosives expert, a retired bus driver now raising goats, the cleric-poet R. J. Thomas, and a fervent nationalist waitress who is one of many Welsh fighting to preserve both a land and a language threatened by an influx of outsiders. (Publisher's Weekly)