AS I WALK THESE BROKEN ROADS SERIES

But though Leigh Fermor did eventually make it to Constantinople, the book doesn’t. The Broken Road picks up exactly where Between the Woods and the Water ends, at the Iron Gates. After his death, Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron took over and pulled together The Broken Road. As you might have been able to guess based on how slowly he produced the first two volumes, he was something of a perfectionist. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, the trilogy incomplete (though it’s inspired a generation of British travel writers).īut wait! Not so fast! In 2008, Artemis Cooper, Leigh Fermor’s biographer, discovered in the office of his British publisher a manuscript that covered the last stretch of the journey, mostly across Bulgaria (with a detour to Bucharest). The second book, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986 and left Leigh Fermor at the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River between Romania and Bulgaria. After another 15 years, in 1977, he finally produced a book, A Time of Gifts, the first in a projected trilogy, that chronicled the journey as far as Hungary. Leigh Fermor thought back on his youthful journey and began writing. Nearly 30 years later, Leigh Fermor had become famous as a war hero (one of his exploits, the capture of the German commander of Crete, was made into a movie) and as a travel writer, and Holiday magazine asked him to write an essay on the joys of walking. He had a travel allowance from his parents of one pound a week. He wore a pair of hobnailed boots and carried with him a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a flashlight, a notebook, and the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace’s Odes. In 1933, expelled from school and having nothing better to do, Patrick Leigh Fermor, an 18-year-old Englishman, set off from London determined to walk across Europe from “the hook of Holland” to Istanbul, which, romantically, he always referred to as Constantinople. Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive/ National Library of Scotland.7/28: Lawyers for Social Justice Reception.

AS I WALK THESE BROKEN ROADS SERIES

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As i walk these broken roads