Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

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Leigh Fermor arrived in Istanbul on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece, spending a few weeks in Mount Athos. During periods of leave, Leigh Fermor spent time at Tara, a villa in Cairo rented by Moss, where the "rowdy household" of SOE officers was presided over by Countess Zofia (Sophie) Tarnowska. The first book in the series, A Time of Gifts, recounts Leigh Fermor's journey as far as the Middle Danube. He was famous for his wartime heroism in occupied Crete, where he lived as a shepherd among the resistance fighters in the mountains and masterminded the daring abduction of the German garrison commander.

Here, he gulped great draughts of European history, poring over details of Germanic folklore or piecing together the complex literary heritage of the world through which he was passing, and which was soon to be lost forever. At Trinity Hall, he had an unusual encounter with CS Lewis when, on an after-dinner stroll back to his rooms, the tongue-tied and slightly nervous Pálffy broke the ice by asking Lewis if he thought the English obsession with the weather had anything to do with the sinking of the Spanish Armada. Original blue boards, spine lettered in gilt, front board blocked in gilt, dustjacket printed in colour. Between the Woods and the Water On Foot to Comstantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates.A planned third volume of Leigh Fermor's journey from the Iron Gate to Constantinople was never completed in the author's lifetime but was issued posthumously as THE BROKEN ROAD in 2013. You can listen online or download (press the downwards pointing arrow on the right hand side menu bar of the player). Between the Woods and the Water (1986) begins with the author crossing the Mária Valéria bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and ends when he reaches the Iron Gate, where the Danube formed the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania. The books he later wrote about this walk 'A Time of Gifts', 'Between the Woods and the Water' and the posthumous 'The Broken Road' are a half remembered, half reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century. There is a very detailed description of it in Between the Woods and the Water (pp 27, 29, 32 in the paperback edition).

From ruins further from the shore the land sloped more gently, and vineyards and orchards descended in layers to the tree-reflecting banks. The young Fermor appears to have been as delightful a traveling companion as the much older Fermor a raconteur.

He set off on 8 December 1933 with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a Loeb volume of Horace's Odes. The concerted spin of a score of barley-sugar pillars uphold elliptic galleries where brass combines with polished oak, and obelisks and pineapples alternate on the balustrades. The river streamed past wooded islands and when I gazed either way, the seeming water-staircase climbed into the distance.

But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.István already spoke English fluently, and there was a ready-made group of Hungarian émigrés willing to welcome him.