Recording a number of fact-finding tours made on horseback through the south of England, it see-saws between evocative and accurate descriptions of the beauties of the countryside, and indignant outbursts at the mushroom growth of cities and the sufferings of the exploited poor. For Cobbett saw he old rural England in its death struggle, and his book stands as memorial to it. It is also the self-portrait of a remarkable Englishman – manly, blunt, pragmatic, sometimes choleric – whose closest counterpart in our time, as writer and man, as probably George Orwell.