Martin Palmer, 59, is an author, broadcaster, translator, conservationist and expert on religion. He recently took part in the Swindon Festival of Literature, talking about his book, Sacred Land. His love of landscapes and their meanings arose during his teens, when he lived in Swindon. Martin lives in Bath and is married to author Victoria Finlay. The couple have two children and a grandchild.

THE distinguished head of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation became a dab hand at the little-known sport of car cricket during his time in Swindon.

“You have a very large guitar,” Martin Palmer explained, “and you stand in the middle of the road – late at night, preferably.

“As the car comes towards you, you see how long you can stand in the middle of the road before you leap aside as the car hurtles past or screeches to a halt.”

Martin’s car cricketing career came to an end near his Bath Road home when his friends made a poor choice of vehicle.

He said: “It was a police car. At the moment we were all being questioned, my parents turned up with some guests, slightly bemused that their son was being interviewed by the local constabulary shortly after midnight.”

The fact that Martin’s father was the vicar of Christ Church at the time added to the sense of occasion. Martin does not recommend the sport to others.

He was born in Bristol, the son of Canon Derek and occupational therapist Cecily Palmer.

He said: “My family have been Bristolian going back 500 years. The name ‘Palmer’ means that some time before pilgrimage was banned, one of my ancestors walked to Jerusalem and came back with a palm leaf.”

His father’s posting to Old Town came in 1968, and the family was to remain in Swindon until the canon was appointed Archdeacon of Rochester a decade later. Martin has a brother, Nigel, and two sisters, Sheila and Yan Chi. Yan Chi was adopted as an orphan from Hong Kong and arrived, aged 11, on Boxing Day, 1973.

Martin had gone to work at the orphanage in 1972 after leaving Commonweal School. Realising that orphans there at the time didn’t have the brightest of futures, he alerted his parents. Yan Chi grew up in Swindon and trained as a nurse.

In 1973, Martin went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to study theology, religious studies and Chinese, but has always remained fond of Swindon. He credits his time here with igniting his passion for landscapes and their meanings, a passion which led him to write Sacred Land.

“Swindon was fundamental to that,” he said. “I used to cycle to the Marlborough Downs, hill forts, Avebury, the Berkshire Downs, the White Horses.” He also took part in an archaeological dig that unearthed traces of a Roman town near East Swindon.

“I used to love wandering through the New Town and looking at what the railway had put in – the traditions and architectural styles. I also just loved going to the Marlborough Downs and the Ridgeway.

“Swindon was a place from which I could explore the urban and the rural. It’s an ancient town dating back to 8000BC and right up to date with the coming of the railways and the rest of it.”

Martin insists that for anybody who takes the time to notice, every name of every place tells a story. “For example,” he said, “The old church was Holy Rood, which means that at some point in the middle ages there was a fragment of the True Cross in that church. What on earth was a fragment of the True Cross doing in a very small town? There’s a story there that’s yet to be told.”

While still at university, Martin launched a national campaign urging people to give up lunch one day a week and send the money to a charity such as Oxfam. He also began regular radio broadcasts for the BBC, something he does to this day.

After Cambridge he went to Manchester and worked for a Christian education movement, and founded the country’s first multi-faith education centre. He also developed a series of urban trails highlighting the ways different faiths and cultures put their marks on the landscape.

Attracting the attention of the World Wildlife Fund, he pioneered education encompassing both religion and the environment, and wrote a book, Worlds of Difference, which has sold one and a half million copies in more than 20 languages.

A staunch early ally was WWF president the Duke of Edinburgh, and in 1995 the two launched the Alliance of Religion and Conservation. Martin has been the Duke’s religious adviser on the environment for 27 years. He is also an advisor to the United Nations, and is director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture.

He has written several other books and also translates Chinese literature for a major publisher.

The curiosity he felt as a schoolboy cycling in and around Swindon burns as brightly as ever, and is something he loves to foster in others.

“If you look at the lie of the land you can begin to see why things are there, and begin to answer questions about what its significance would have been.”

Sacred Land, RRP £16.99, is available from bookshops and online outlets such as Amazon.