Walking the Woods and the Water

● If you are a current subscriber to the quarterly your basket will update to show any discounts before the payment page during checkout ● If you want to subscribe now and buy books or goods at the member rate please add a subscription to your basket before adding other items ● Gift wrap, messages and delivery instructions may be added during the checkout process ● If you need help please send us a message using the form in the bottom left of your screen and we’ll be in touch as soon as we’re back at our desks.

‘Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe. He set out as an homage to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s legendary tramp across Europe in the early 1930s, but his journey became – of course – an epic adventure in its own right. A book about gifts, modernity, endurance and landscape, it represents a fine addition to the literature of the leg.’ Robert Macfarlane

Aged eighteen, Nick Hunt read A Time of Gifts and dreamed of following in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s footsteps. In 2011 he began his own great trudge – on foot all the way to Istanbul. He walked across Europe through eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges.

Using Fermor’s books as his only travel guide, he trekked some 2,500 miles through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. His aim? To have an old-fashioned adventure. To slow down and linger in a world where we pass by so much, so fast. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, the mysterious, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe’s surface.

A Great Adventure

Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water

In late December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot for Constantinople (as he anachronistically termed it). Recently expelled from school for the unpardonable crime of holding hands with a...

Off All the Standard Maps

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli

The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew...

Robert Macfarlane: ‘When I first read A Time of Gifts I felt it in my feet. It spoke to my soles . . .’

Listen to Robert Macfarlane reading from The Gifts of Reading. Recorded especially for Adventures for Harriet: a 600-mile literary pilgrimage across Europe by foot.