There was a time, now long gone, when our houses were built from rock quarried locally.

Changing transport and labour costs meant that the material now used to build our homes has come hundreds of miles, resulting in a more homogeneous Britain. Ted Nield feels this keenly, as a geologist brought up in a part of Wales where distinctive local stone helped to define the character of the area. Nield can do what lesser mortals can't, which is to see the poetry in geological strata or take against a range of mountains because he doesn't like "the way they think". Rather than being awed by global tectonic forces, his passion for geology extends outwards from the local, and this heartfelt book is partly a family memoir, albeit one which will happily digress for several pages on the diaries of 18th-century country parsons or how a misunderstanding of the word "inferior" caused an expensive and angry confrontation at the British Museum.