FINE litterbugs £500 and tax takeaways. Strong headline grabbers for Bill Bryson’s latest travel book – The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island.

As the title implies, it’s a follow up to the book that made Bill’s name – his 1995 best-seller Notes From a Small Island. The love for diminutive Britain that the visiting American mid-westerner gained on his UK Odyssey led to him becoming a British citizen. That choice crowned a pilgrim’s progress during which he served six years as Chancellor of Durham University and five as figurehead of the Council to Protect Rural England.

Virtually combining those roles, Bill once led a litter-clearing team around Durham. Litter has always been one of Bill’s chief bugbears, and many of us, as disgusted by the mess as he is, will be grateful for the high profile attention he has brought to it. Spotlighting it again in interviews for his new book he declares: “What really disturbs me is there doesn’t seem to be any will by anyone in authority to do anything about it.”

Coupled with his proposed £500 fine, another of Bill’s solutions is more litter bins. In towns that might be OK, though litter bins can be litter. In Whitby there’s a huge bin that completely ruins a picturesque harbour view. (Just one, do you say?) Highway bins tend constantly to overflow. And it’s idle to believe that if every layby was lined with bins, people inclined to throw litter would not still casually toss their rubbish from their cars.

Takeaways, of course, are a big part of that problem. But Bill doesn’t claim his proposed tax would make people take their takeway rubbish (the packaging that is) home. He aims it at generating more income for public services (hurrah). “It would raise billions of pounds every year,” he says.

But, welcome though it is, it’s a shame Bill’s battle against litter has grabbed a lion’s share of publicity for his new book. For Bill has a far greater concern for his beloved British countryside. He writes: “The sad irony is the things that make the landscape of Britain comely and distinctive are almost entirely no longer needed.”

Hedgerows, country churches, stone barns and “sheep roaming over windswept fells” are identified by Bill as elements that can “only rarely now be justified on economic grounds.” He comments: “There is a strange, blind, foolish inclination to suppose that the features that make the British countryside are somehow infinitely self-sustaining, that they will always be there, adding grace and beauty. Don’t count on it.”

Very true, so it’s a surprise Bill doesn’t seem to have used his new book to advance his most radical idea. In his first address to the CPRE he urged: “ I have often wondered why we don’t make the whole of England a national park…It is preposterous really to say that some parts are better or more important than others. It’s all lovely and there’s not much of it… every bit should be cherished.”

A superb bulls-eye. Perversely, designation of a few landscapes as ‘special’ is increasingly rendering the rest more or less fair game for anything that might be thrown at it. Caring for the whole of our shrinking countryside is a bigger, better message than heavier fines on litter louts.