The 'Great Hedge of India' is a riveting read. The story of Englishman Roy Moxham's quest to find the remnants of what was once the longest hedge in the world, the book has almost a fictional flavour. But this tale is no hoax.

The hedge that once stretched 2300 miles from the western border of Punjab down to the Bay of Bengal was manned by 12,000 men and planted by the British to enforce the collection of the Salt Tax.

Like most modern-day Asians, my knowledge of the Salt Tax is minimal. The principal memory being Mahatma Gandhi's famous Salt March - immortalised in Richard Attenborough's beautifully made film of the same name. However the Salt Tax was in force more than a century before that historical moment. Indeed salt tax was one of the first known taxes dating back several centuries to the early Indian Kingdoms.

Roy Moxham's extensive research skills unearth for the reader the salient points about "the Raj's" efforts in collecting this tax. He pores over dusty documents, maps and archives in the legendary institutions and libraries of the UK - the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies among others - to examine the facts through different eyes. He lays bare the inadequacies and unfairness of the tax, but also helps to explain why and how it continued to be imposed in India and its pivotal role in Colonial rule.

He explores the physiological effects of salt depravation and why it is necessity for life. He calculates the punitive cost of the tax on the poor and extrapolates this to its cost today. The whole issue of 'Salt' is detailed in this book and for those living in the Western World, where over consumption of salt is the main health topic; the book offers fascinating new insight.

What I enjoyed most about this book is that it is part travelogue and part historical documentary, fused together with an engaging, conversational style of writing.

Mr Moxham is undoubtedly an Indophile and an adventurous traveller. With the help of friends and strangers alike, he makes several expeditions into deepest rural India in search of remnants of the hedge. He is patient with the privations of travelling in India. He sleeps on charpoys on verandas and eats all manner of home-cooked vegetarian food with few complaints. He understands the bureaucracy of India and instead of railing against it; he makes time in his schedule to accommodate these inconveniences. He thinks nothing of queuing half a day to buy a rail ticket and complains little when his finds his pre-booked berth already occupied!

For Indians and non-Indians alike, this book is a refreshing look at a long-forgotten aspect of political history. Roy Moxham visits a disused salt production factory; the Indian Satellite Tracking Station and he roams in woods frequented by known dacoits.

The research became an obsession of his for almost three years and the book, a culmination of all his efforts to document this trek. Sparked of by an impulse purchase of 'Ramblings and Recollections of an Indian Official' by Major General Sir W H Sleeman KCB, the £25 Roy Moxham paid for that book has paid off handsomely.

Shooting to the top of the non-fiction Best-seller list when first published, this book is a scholarly gem.

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