Vagabond, adventurer, spy, author – Patrick Leigh Fermor ticks all the boxes of cool. His writing sets the benchmark for aspiring travel writers to aspire to. Leigh Fermor’s journey -a walk through a Europe (echoed decades later by Andy Ward) rumbling with anticipation of war- reminds me of how I want the majority of my own journeys to be: low-budget, simple, spontaneous, driven only by curiosity and a desire to learn.
I am certainly not the only person to have been “inspired by the persona he created of the bookish wanderer: the footloose scholar in the wilds, scrambling through remote mountains, a knapsack full of books on his shoulder.” You can read more about that, his life, and his latest book in this interesting article in the Telegraph.
One of the most exhilarating and inspiring travel books I’ve read; I would love some time to recreate his journey and follow in his footsteps. His writing spills over with rich vocabulary, he seems intoxicated by words as he describes the places and buildings he visits- read the description of Melk Abbey, for instance,to get a flavour of prose that verges on the rhapsodic. His love of remote languages and obscure nuggets of history, literature and geography make this a classic. His quote from Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”-“Ours is a great wild country…” surely sums up the lure of the forested mountains and valleys of central Europe, that he travelled through with such relish.