From early childhood, when her eccentric mother would take her on trips along her beloved Ridgeway in a horse-drawn cart, Candida Lycett Green has retained a love of travelling at a horse's pace and casting an eye on the beauty of England through the back door. Framed by a recent 150-mile journey through Yorkshire and Northumberland, Over the Hills and Far Away also dips back into the journeys by horse Candida has taken at the turning points in her life. From her idyllic childhood in the bohemian Betjeman household, through a charmed youth in the Swinging Sixties, Candida tells a story made all the more poignant by her parents' deaths and her own recent fight with breast cancer.