The Train in Spain, by Christopher Howse, review If you are looking for a Spanish travel book filled with flirtatious dalliances with gipsy musicians and testosterone-charged encounters with terrorists and bulls, then The Train in Spain is not for you. The adventure-temperature in the company of the Telegraph's Christopher Howse is comically low. Here danger comes from walking along a Roman aqueduct or trying to find a shady spot. Indeed the only aggressive encounter in the book is when the author repeatedly chides the long-dead Sacheverell Sitwell for dismissing a church interior without a proper inspection of its many delights. Nor does Howse immerse himself in the famously rigorous landscape of Spain. So we are spared the taste of the wind, the scent of the soil, lone experiences in forests, abandoned castles and ancient drove roads of Spain. Howse also avoids excavating the identity, thoughts and aspirations of contemporary Spain through 1,000 chance conversations. Indeed, apart from an encounter buying stamps and the acquisition of sweet treats at the merienda hour - between lunch and dinner - this book is without any real engagement with a living human. Howse's real connections are with carved stone and the printed word, especially with the lovers of Gothic architecture - John Harvey and GE Street, and early travellers such as Richard Ford and the Rev Joseph Townsend. How can a travel writer hope to get away with this? Howse succeeds in taking us with him because The Train in Spain, like some ship of the line shot through with holes, remains gloriously afloat and cuts its own very particular and distinctive course through the waters. We come to love his quiet and self-effacing personal honesty, the unhurried pace, the acutely observant eye, the dry non-judgmental humour and the opening up of obscure alleyways of knowledge. So we set off on a long journey to Zamora to see just one thing, an ancient tomb, and "having seen it... the visitor can leave for another town." But this tomb, for those who have eyes for the truths captured by carved medieval stone, is a very potent thing, its canopy alive with feuding dragons, eagles and entwined harpies locked in conflict. They may protect the resting place of a Queen Urraca, literally the "magpie" whose very name opens a linguistic doorway into the deep past of Spain, her Iberian roots, and the lost linguistic links with Basque. In Merida we discover that the Roman ruins of the theatre reveal a 20th-century taste for archaeology, having previously served as a bullring. Similarly the oven shrine of the city's patron saint, St Eulàlia, is found to reveal evidence of a Visigothic chapel standing on a fourth-century church. Our own memory of St Eulàlia, of her flesh being torn down to her bones with metal claws to test her faith, rests on the testimony of Prudentius" Crowns of Martyrdom, who far from being a speculative poet in Constantinople, turns out to be a Spanish-born lawyer who rose to high government office in the Roman Empire and wrote just 44 years after St Eulàlia's death. In Granada, instead of enthusing and speculating on Moorish kings and the Alhambra - like every other traveller with a pen these past 200 years - Howse sets off for the Emperor Charles V's empty Renaissance palace and follows the tale of John of God, whose life was redirected by hearing a sermon of Juan de Ávila. For this, of course, is Howse's real mission, the hidden backbone of steel that lies beneath his discursive trails. He is hunting out, like a medieval pilgrim, those who have been truly devoted to God, testing the stones for real belief, rather than sham pieties. The Train in Spain by Christopher Howse 256pp, Bloomsbury, Telegraph Books price £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £16.99, ebook £10.04)