Miles Kington: If it's purple, it must be Provence

'Books on rural Italy always have a lone cypress tree. You never get a lone tree on a Spanish or French book'

"To Moscow, to Moscow,

And take a quick look,

Home again, home again,

Write a quick book."

That was how Robyn Davidson summed up travel writing this week, on Radio 4's Midweek. To put it another way, she thinks that most travel writing today isn't really travel writing at all. She's absolutely right, of course, and all I would say in defence of today's travel writers is that it was always true.

For instance, there used to be a series of books covering the British Isles called Highways and Byways in..., a very nice hardback series produced between the wars by Macmillan which took you by the hand through various counties and regions. The one I grew up with was Highways and Byways in North Wales, for the simple reason that I grew up in North Wales and whenever I was elsewhere, my nostalgia for the land of someone else's fathers drove me to this book, as indeed it also drove me to George Borrow's Wild Wales.

Now, the Borrow book was a true travel book – can you imagine even today an Englishman walking the length and breadth of Wales talking Welsh, as Borrow did 150 years ago ? – but Highways and Byways in North Wales was actually a scissors and paste job, jotting together anecdotes and local history and statistics and geology to make enough of a book to get by. What I really liked was the pen and ink drawings, always with scudding clouds, and blowing trees, and birds being tossed by the wind, with the occasional stone building in the background. I thought then that this was very accurate about North Wales.

I now know different. Yesterday I was looking at a copy of Highways and Byways in Dorset and though the words (by Sir Frederick Treves, of Elephant Man fame) are different, I was amazed to find it has exactly the same drawings in it, the same flowing clouds, and scudding branches, and V-shaped birds. Only the buildings are slightly different, as a sop to Dorset.

At first I was chagrined to find this one-drawing-style-fits-all approach, but there again, nothing much changes. Today, in the industry of "travel books", they have settled down to the same lazy shorthand. Have you noticed when you look at all the brightly coloured "travel" books in shop windows, that you can tell what country a book is about instantly, simply by the illustration style of the cover?

Books about Spain usually have lots of yellow on the front, lots of lemons, with or without a bit of tiled roof.

Books about rural Italy always have a lone cypress tree on a hillside, with or without a church next door, and a bright blue sky behind. But the important thing is that bravely erect cypress tree, like the end of an artist's brush sticking up in the landscape. You never get a lone tree on a Spanish or French book, only on an Italian book.

Books set in the South of France must have purple on them. It's the field of lavender in the foreground. Can't have Provence without some lavender.

Books about Greece must have at least half the cover occupied by blinding white architecture, like a birthday cake, with perhaps one of those wonky windmill sails in the back ground. A book about Russia without an onion-domed church on the front cover is a rarity.

The writer, Roy Kerridge, once wrote to tell me that he had written a book about Ireland which the Dublin publishers wanted to make look like a Peter Mayle book. They had sent him a mock-up of the book – lovely Provence-type cover, blank pages inside – which he had taken to his local bookshop to put on the shelves and see what it looked like among all the other travel books. Not bad, actually. He had then taken it down again and was leaving the shop (WH Smith in Victoria Station ) when he was arrested for shoplifting.

"I saw you remove that book," said the Irish security guard.

"Yes, but I put it there to begin with," said Kerridge.

"Tell that to the judge," said the guard.

"That's why it's got blank pages," said Kerridge.

"Oh, very funny," said the guard, till he looked inside the book.

Of course, the publishers had made a big mistake. They had broken all the rules by trying to use the style of one country on the cover of a book about another. "Travel books" about Ireland must have on the cover EITHER fields of impossible greenness with stone walls and a tumble-down house OR an impossibly picturesque bar with an old bike outside. How would you know what country they were set in otherwise?