Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey Through the Carpathian Mountains, Nick Thorpe, Yale University Press, £20.

Ever since Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in December 1933, later recounting his adventures in A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and in the posthumous The Broken Road (2013), many others – usually young, well-educated men with aspirations to write – have followed.

Today, Leigh Fermor is legendary enough, within certain circles, to have his own acronym. P.L.F. Paddy, as he was known to his friends, was glamorous, a handsome war hero, accomplished linguist, mystic and heroic prose stylist. Jan Morris (1926-2020), a travel writer of the highest order who lived a fascinating life, which included being embedded as the only journalist on the 1953 Everest expedition with Hillary and Norgay, felt that Leigh Fermor’s prose was so good that he simply stood ‘beyond envy’ (envy being the writer’s curse). Morris died aged 94, Leigh Fermor at 96. Maybe there is something to be said for the travelling life.

It isn’t surprising, then, that his influence lingers on especially in walking literature, a buoyant sub-category of travel writing that, as a wider genre, has withered since Leigh Fermor’s epoch when Bruce Chatwin and Peter Matthiessen also published their masterpieces.

Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water  (2014) literally followed in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps with a seven-month walk and an ambition to discover what remains of the hospitality and freedoms that so enraptured his ambulatory predecessor. In The Crossway (2018), Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem with critics quickly drawing parallels with Leigh Fermor in their reviews.

Across the years, all of these writers shared an aim: to gain a greater understanding of a place from the ground up. Slowing down in order to see better.

In Nick Thorpe’s latest book, Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey through the Carpathian Mountains, Leigh Fermor only makes a brief appearance in the last chapter but he is present in another way, and strikingly so. The cover design is an unmistakable nod to those distinctive Leigh Fermor book jackets beautifully drawn by John Craxton. Even the title font is the same.

Thorpe’s book is classic travel writing, too, taking the form of a quest to draw a portrait of Europe’s last wilderness, the Carpathian Mountains of Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Ukraine, which ‘cut through the former Austro-Hungarian empire like a boomerang.’

This is where great spruce and beech forests, grass meadows, ancient villages and fragile ecosystems are under threat from climate change and illegal logging. Rare flora and fauna could soon be gone for good, Romanian meadows are disappearing, as are the old-growth forests of Slovakia and Ukraine. This is indeed a reason to set out and record, and going gradually by foot – being closer to the earth – makes sense. Throughout history, borders have been in flux in this contentious region. As Thorpe puts it, the mountain ranges are like a pack of cards being ‘constantly reshuffled’. An unhurried pace, therefore, brings benefits.

Thorpe’s meandering 1,500km journey begins close to Bratislava, and follows the mountains clockwise, to the Romanian border with Serbia. He is a convivial and likeable guide. Not too earnest, not too macho (‘this is not a guidebook for mountain climbers’), self-deprecating and snobbish in equal measure (he is appalled by plasticky tourism tat and communist-era hotels.) He is, quite rightly, shameless in appreciating life’s good things: beer is ‘healing’, a pain au chocolat is ‘healing’, streams, springs and waters are most definitely healing. He is the sort of walking companion one hopes for, somebody who views stopping for a glass of fiery fruit spirit, a plate of dumplings or a long chat as an essential part of the journey.

Throughout, the language is transportive and painterly: relief maps appear as a ‘crumpled blanket’, and the High Tatras are ‘spread like the eyebrows of Europe.’ The landscapes he covers are ones that he is generally familiar with from his previous trips, dating back to 1986. While writing the book, he tells us, he became a Hungarian citizen. Proximity and commitment to the region adds a level of authority and credibility and given that the main thrust of the book is to chronicle the Carpathian Mountains, such knowledge is essential. This is no gap year yomp.

While walking the Little Carpathians, in Slovakia, he laments how marshland was drained by the communist authorities. They also redirected the direction of vines for maximum wine production. A few chapters on, he switches from Hungary back again to Slovakia, and having spoken in depth to a horticulturist, goes on to write deliciously about orchards, and in particular cherries.

For all of its focus on nature, this is a book of human stories, told by farmers and fishermen, shepherds, carpenters, beekeepers, hunters and conservationists. Many still recount tales of the communist era, and lands lost to collectives, and it is important to document these testimonies. Others he meets speak of how there is conflict when it comes to replenishing forests lost to storms or ‘windthrows’. The forestry industry wants to extract the trees while ecologists prefer them to rot as that way new seedbeds form naturally for new trees to grow.

He is also honest about corruption in Ukraine and the poaching that goes on in the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve, despite it being part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves of UNESCO since 1992. As he points out, the European Union and the United States are already discussing how to rebuild Ukraine after the war, and there are ‘plans to build a circular road through the Carpathians, to open them up for tourism.’ Oligarchs are threatening to build new giant ski resorts. Campaigners, Thorpe informs us, are fighting this in the courts.

Because of his longstanding experience in the region, he is able to draw interesting parallels and to remind us of conflicts almost forgotten today – the power cuts in Ukraine remind him of the atmosphere during the war in Croatia in 1991, ‘a ghost country.’ There is also an eerie passage reminiscent of the kind of folkloric superstitions that deep forests in eastern Europe encourage. Sharing some cep mushrooms with a guesthouse manager he is told that an elderly lady had delivered a ridiculously abundant bundle of them with a warning. Their profusion that year meant only one thing, that war was coming: ‘Within four months, the Russians had advanced deep into Ukraine.’

But there are successes to learn of as well. The upper Tichá and Kôprová has ‘won’ protection status and the complex network of different trees growing there now, conservationists believe, will be more storm resistant in the future. In between the trees there, Thorpe finds tales of bears, and how they choose which deer to pursue from their scat, which hints at whether the deer is old or healthy, and how, just like us, bears have a taste for delectable pine nuts. The stone pine trees are ancient, some a thousand years old, ‘the oldest in the Carpathians.’ Thorpe later returns again to the Tichá to find out about rewilding, ‘something nature does herself – if we simply stop interfering.’

Whether this is strictly a walking book isn’t always clear. But then walking is often not the most interesting part of the travelogue, and Thorpe seems aware of this. The logistics of walking are actually quite dull, all compass bearings and a landscape that doesn’t change much for many miles. For a walking book to make an impact, either the storytelling must be captivating or else the book must have a critical message to deliver. Thorpe manages to deliver on both fronts.