Book: Sacred Land by Martin Palmer

With a foreword by Melvyn Bragg. Published by Piatkus in paperback on 1 March 2012, £16.99

In the early 1990s, British theologian Martin Palmer went to Moscow to work with Russian Orthodox priests on their environment programmes. One evening he had a conversation which changed his view of the world. An old priest showed him that the city of Moscow was laid out according to the images in the Book of Revelation, and when he expressed his amazement, they told him that every city in Europe, built before the 18th century, incorporated circles, triangles and crossroads symbolising the Unity of God, the Trinity and the crucifixion.

In Russia they had never forgotten that they were building the City of God when they created towns and cities. But in Britain, that memory had largely been lost. This book contains the keys to unlock the meanings hidden in Britain's cities, towns and fields, and shows how anyone, with a few useful tools and pieces of knowledge, can decode the landscape and understand more about how we live.

Sacred Land aims to help us reconnect with our environment and encourages us to re-examine the surroundings we may take for granted. Palmer - Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, based near Bath, UK - shows how place names indicate a town's origin: towns ending in thorpe, holme or by were originally Viking settlements; places ending in bury or field were originally Saxon and you can trace the limits to the Viking invasions in the north by looking at the place names on maps today.

He shows how Edinburgh's Georgian New Town was laid out deliberately to make a political statement about the Scots and the English; how Bristol (Palmer's home town) laid out as a Celtic cross; how you can detect the residue of the many different settlers in Canterbury over the years through looking at a street map; and traces the four major ecological collapses in Britain through the signs they have left on the land. With a detailed gazetteer listing all places mentioned, Sacred Land is the perfect guide to the undiscovered Britain around us.

Martin Palmer is a writer and broadcaster living near Bath. In 1995, he co-founded the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) with the Duke of Edinburgh. The Sacred Land project was launched in 1997 in partnership with WWF, to protect, revive and restore sacred sites around the world. This book is a companion to that programme. Palmer has worked as a special advisor to the UNDP on climate change and faiths, and appears regularly on the BBC and other networks, talking about religions and the environment.

For more information on ARC see: www.arcworld.org