The Patrick Leigh Fermor Appreciation Society discussion
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Between the Woods and the Water
Patrick Leigh Fermor books
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Between the Woods and the Water
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The Patrick Leigh Fermor Appreciation Society
Books mentioned in this topic
Between The Woods And The Water: On Foot to Constantinople - The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (other topics)A Time of Gifts (other topics)
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (other topics)
A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople - from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (other topics)
Between the Woods and the Water (other topics)
Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople - from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933 - to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day - proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor’s account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between The Woods And The Water, the second volume of three, garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts.
The opening of the book finds Patrick Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube - at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, the story is picked up again in The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos (published posthumously in 2013).