Guardian journalist and former Wisden editor Matthew Engel’s new book is an amiable, engaging journey through every county in England. Yorkshire features prominently. STEPHEN LEWIS reports.

ENGLAND, says the journalist and author Matthew Engel, is possibly the most complicated place in the world.

He realised that when trying to explain to his eight-year-old son Laurie which country the family lived in.

“Since our home was barely five miles from the Welsh border and we crossed it without thinking all the time, it was not just a theoretical question,” the Guardian journalist and former editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack writes in the introduction to his new book Engel’s England. “When we went into Wales, we entered a new country, but then again we didn’t.”

Engel’s England is his attempt to understand the impossible nation he calls home. In 2011, he set off on a three-year journey through what the book’s blurb calls “some of the world’s least-discovered and most impenetrable terrain: deepest England”.

The result, Engel says, is not a guidebook: it’s a travel book, in which the author takes his quirky and inquiring mind to every one of England’s 39 counties (and before you start checking that number, Engel isn’t bothered about things such as local government reorganisation: Yorkshire, in his book, counts as one county, and so does little Rutland).

If England is complicated, then Yorkshire can be, to the uninitiated outsider, frankly bewildering. But Engel’s journey through the broad acres is as engaging and idiosyncratic as you might expect from a former editor of Wisden.

He starts his chapter, appropriately enough, with a reading of the Yorkshire Declaration of Integrity at Walmgate Bar on Yorkshire Day, August 1, 2011.

It’s a magnificent and rather defiant declaration that reads as follows: “I declare... That Yorkshire is three Ridings and the City of York with these boundaries of 1,136 years standing; That the address of all places in these Ridings is YORKSHIRE; That all persons born therein or resident therein and loyal to the Ridings are Yorkshire men and women; That any person or corporate body which deliberately ignores or defies the aforementioned shall forfeit all claims to Yorkshire status.”

That’s telling the bureaucrats.

Sadly, the knot of people who gathered for the declaration of Yorkshireness made from Walmgate Bar that humid August morning didn’t quite match the thunderous eloquence of the language itself.

The declaration was greeted with a “cheer from everyone present, a crowd totalling fifteen”, Engel writes.

“There was a brace of Japanese tourists on the city wall and two ladies in the coffee shop; otherwise just the heedless traffic. Roger Sewell, chairman of the Yorkshire Ridings Society, said the turnout was always a bit thin at Walmgate... ‘Things will warm up later’, he said.”

They certainly do in Engels’ lovely chapter on Yorkshire. His wanderings take him to the field of the Battle of Towton, the ‘grisliest day ever on English soil’; to the home of Yorkshire cricket (of course); to Sheffield to sample that Yorkshire delicacy Henderson’s Spicy Relish; and to the ‘rhubarb triangle’ north of Wakefield.

Along the way, he encounters a host of pithy Yorkshire sayings along the lines of “Eat all, sup all, pay nowt’, and has a conversation with someone he describes only as his one of his ‘favourite Yorkshiremen’.

What’s the biggest county in England? this friend asks him.

Yorkshire, he replies.

What’s the second biggest?

At this, he begins to get suspicious.

“We are talking traditional counties?”

“Of course.”

“Well, Lincolnshire, then.”

“Wrong! The West Riding!” his friend pronounces triumphantly.

Which is true, but only just, Engel concludes ruefully in this lovely and engaging book.

• Engel’s England by Matthew Engel is published this week by Profile Books, priced £20