IN 1934, PADDY Leigh Fermor - 18 years old, broke, and having dropped out of his planned Army Officer career - decided to walk across Europe. His plan was to hike from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, a journey of 2,600km, on £4 a month, like ‘a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar’. Gregarious, likable and endlessly curious about the the places he passed through, he hobnobbed with hobos, aristocracy, prostitutes and academics, recording his meandering 13-month long trail across the continent in a series of notebooks, which later in life, he turned into two endlessly beguiling books: A Time of Gifts, and Between the Woods and the Water (the concluding volume: The Broken Road, was published posthumously). In 2011, Nick Hunt wrote Between the Woods and Water, his excellent account of his own seven-month version of Paddy’s walk through a Europe racked with the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.
The desire to follow Paddy and Nick’s journeys across the Continent has been a constant whisper in the back of my head for a decade and counting. My daydreams teem with visions of misty forests, medieval towns, wolf-haunted mountains and ruined castles; landscapes imbued with hundreds of years of history, like layers on an onion, just waiting to be peeled off. Inspired, I learned about the crazy patchwork of electorates, dukedoms and free cities that made up the Holy Roman Empire and its thousand years of ritual, customs and sectarian strife. I read about Baroque, Breughal, the Thirty Years War and Frederick Barbarossa - names and terms I vaguely knew but which my history degree had passed by. And whenever I could, I visited the places Paddy passed through: Rotterdam, Cologne, Nijmegen, Heidelberg. I even cycled the Dutch part of his trip backwards over one memorable weekend. But the dream was still to recreate the journey itself, to understand and experience how much had survived, both from Paddy’s day, and from the older history he was himself looking back on.
We started our trek in autumn 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic; and aim to finish it by 2040. The complexities of life mean that - unlike Paddy and Nick - we cannot complete this journey in a single stretch, but are section-hiking the route across an expanse of years. Our approach has been unorthodox from the start: COVID travel restrictions meant that we had to start our walk at the German border and backtrack two years later to cover the Netherlands. The arrival of our son in 2023 has made walking a logistical challenge that will require multiple adaptations. But as the compromises mount up and the years lengthen, it is becoming clear that the deviations and adaptations of our journey aren’t detracting from some imagined purity of route, but enriching it with all of the wonderful complications of modern life and family. This book will be the story of a long walk, but also the story of a marriage and parenthood. It will become a narrative of twenty years: of pandemics and climate change, of political turmoil… and I hope; for a more positive future for Europe as a whole.
The Netherlands: Hook Van Holland to Kleve - 2023, aged 36
Whestphalia: Kleve to Bonn - 2021, aged 34
The Rhein: Bonn to Mannheim - 2024, aged 37
Swabia: Heidelberg to Ulm
Bavaria: Ulm to Salzburg
Casa de Austria: Salzburg to Vienna
Danubia: Vienna to Estzergom
The Kingdom of Hungary: Estzergom to the Alfold
The Great Hungarian Plain: Atfold to Timiosaura
The Carpathians: Timiosaura to the Iron Gates
The Black Sea: The Iron Gates to Istanbul