In the author's words his 'ridiculous obsession', arose from the chance discovery of some dusty memoirs that told of a mighty hedge spanning the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century. Writer Jan Morris comments, 'At first I thought this remarkable book must be a hoax ... It tells the story of one of the least-known wonders of Queen Victoria's India - a customs barrier 2,300 miles long, most of it made of hedge. It was patrolled by 12,000 men and would have stretched from London to Constantinople, yet few historians mention it and most of us have never heard of it. Could anything be more astonishing'?