‘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
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...
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Read moreRobert 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.
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