The roads England’s tourists skipped

James John Hissey wrote for travellers happy to leave the famous sights to everyone else. Untravelled England goes looking for the parts of the country that the usual routes passed by: quiet roads, small towns and villages, old buildings, and the local character that makes one district unlike the next. It came out in 1906, early in the age of the motor car, when easier travel was changing how people spent their free time and how far into the countryside they went to find it.

Books of this kind mix the writer’s own journeys with notes on the roads, villages and historic places along the way. A reader now gets both one man’s wanderings and a picture of rural England as an Edwardian traveller found it.

This copy is the first edition, published in London by Macmillan, in its original navy cloth decorated in gilt, worn at the spine ends and along the board edges. The owner reports all 24 full-page illustrations present. Translucent patches at the front and rear inner hinges may be old tape or reinforcement and want a closer look; there is no dust jacket.