ROAMING BRITAIN

A half dozen travels books to his credit bear evidence that the Prices are unorthodox travellers, and the first quarter of this enticing book about travelling from ""Land's End to John O'Groats"" is further witness. Not only do they go to England by a trans-Polar flight, but they spend their first weeks feeling the heart of Britain by tracing the Thames from its source at Thames Head to where its waters merge with the waters of the North Sea. Through the Cotswolds- loveliest bits of Old England- they journeyed by foot, by canoe, paddling and poling. They took side excursions and visited famous folk and simple folk with equal gusto. They shifted to a ""boathouse"" and learned the ways of the locks. They saw Oxford and Reading and Henley, Windsor and Hampton Court. They came at last to London. Then- in more commonplace fashion- they acquired an Austin and motored the length and breadth of the land, drinking in its richness of tradition and history, loving its lakes and its moors and its mountains, its cities and its villages, and its garden roadsides. Cathedrals and castles, great homes and small, farms and inns- good and bad- they took their time and shared the wide scope of their experience in this book. Scotland and Wales are less intimately savored, but even so there's enough to what the appetite. Good travelers these two- over some 6,280 miles by car and 1800 by boat. Odd chapters here and there give useful information on speech and customs, on the ways of motoring and the food. And- throughout- their enthusiasm is contagious.