In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead . . . In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.