The artist John Bunting was a contradictory and now largely unremembered man who touched greatness but seems to have fallen short of it himself. Born in 1927, he was a devout Catholic, his own sculptures reflecting his deep Christian concerns, yet he was also preoccupied with war and its participants. He was a patriarch, in love with the idea of a large family but restlessly unhappy at the messy reality of small children, who eventually divorced and lived alone.
The key event in his life was the moment he acquired a patch of land on the North York Moors. On this rented upland pasture called Scotch Corner, Bunting erected his own private chapel in 1957. The project was inspired by monastic structures he had seen in the Algerian desert, built by the French hermit Charles de Foucauld. The Englishman then filled his Yorkshire shrine with sculptures of his own design.
One might easily argue that Bunting's truest gift to posterity is the talent expressed by his various offspring, including Madeleine Bunting, columnist for this newspaper and author of this book. In The Plot she attempts to unravel the complexities of a difficult parent, and she does so from an intriguing and oblique angle.
The personal memoir of her father is told through the wider story of her family's enforced relationship with this acre in North Yorkshire. On top of this private narrative a more general intellectual inquiry into the British landscape is thickly layered, tier upon tier, with stories of all kinds, personal and public. To explore the song-lines crisscrossing her own childhood landscape, Bunting scoured the Yorkshire moors in person and then sifted the literature with great care. She also sank inquiring shafts into the underlying soil to excavate the region's prehistoric and medieval past. Sometimes she found stories in the most unlikely places. One of the most compelling is her account of local sheep, which she proposes as humankind's most important domestic animal.
Until the 17th century, wool accounted for two-thirds of British exports. Bunting argues that wool, dung and tallow, from which our ancestors made candles, were all much more important than sheep's meat. As she so pungently suggests, the nights of the Middle Ages must always have had that faintly urine-like odour of mutton.
My personal favourite of Bunting's many song-lines is her account of the old drovers' road that was used for hundreds of years to move cattle from the furthest Highlands to London. This broad track passed slap-bang through Scotch Corner – it may, indeed, explain its name – and Bunting follows its extraordinary stories the whole length to the old Smithfield Market near her present home.
The drovers who plodded across the Bunting plot, knitting as they passed, feeding on the cattle's own blood, were an extraordinary lot who trod a parallel line through the early-modern imagination, partly as Rob Roy-like mythic heroes, but also as hairy tartan-clad villains. One detail that Bunting discovered seems by itself to conjure a version of England as remote and exotic as anything in the Ethiopian Highlands or Tibetan plateau. The drovers had dogs to help with their shepherding exercises, and after they had walked hundreds of miles alongside their masters, the dogs would be sent home alone. The animals were fed at inns along the way and their masters would reimburse these human benefactors on their return leg.
Bunting's exploration of the relationships between place and people is wide-ranging, researched with great intelligence and richly supported by detail. Yet the story that really dominates The Plot – running counter perhaps to the grain of its author's real intentions – is that of her father. She evokes him with daughterly tenderness but try as she might, John Bunting does not emerge as a particularly sympathetic man.
Though passionate about his own portion of England, he seemed at war with life generally, stamping on the moles and spraying the bees that invaded his territory and on one memorable occasion killing an adder that had shared their communal space for years. In a brilliant reversal of the moral conventions associated with dragon slaying, he is portrayed not as some latter-day knight, but as a rather sad, self-centred and defeated little man who brings the spade down on the snake in a moment of frenzy.
When Bunting interviewed Antony Gormley about her father, Gormley suggested that the writing of her book would be a source of "liberation". It has proved prophetic. As much as The Plot describes the way in which we are a landlocked people, whose lives are made intelligible by relationship to place, it is also about the way in which the telling of stories has a strange and magical capacity to set us free.
Mark Cocker's Crow Country is published by Vintage. Listen to a podcast of Madeleine Bunting on a visit to the plot, with her seven-year-old son, at theguardian.com/books.
