One Woman Walks Europe (eBook)

Ursula Martin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
420 Seiten
Honno Press (Verlag)
9781916821095 (ISBN)

Infos

From Wales to Ukraine and Back Again the gripping sequel to her bestselling One Woman Walks Wales Join Ursula Martin on an epic 5500-mile trek across Europe in One Woman Walks Europe, an adventurous tale of endurance and self-discovery.

Ursula Martin has focused her youth on travelling, in between periods of low paid work. She was born in Swansea, grew up in Derbyshire and lives in Newtown. She has a small overgrown garden where she plants seeds and forgets to harvest them. Her first book, One Woman Walks Wales, was published by Honno in 2018.

---

From Wales to Ukraine and Back Again the gripping sequel to her bestselling One Woman Walks WalesJoin Ursula Martin on an epic 5500-mile trek across Europe in One Woman Walks Europe, an adventurous tale of endurance and self-discovery.</PAn exhilarating journey into the wild nature of land and her own spirit; the survival of walking and wild camping in remote rural areas leads to a deep, grounded connection with the landscape and Ursula's own body. Pushing through fear and exhaustion, her limitations were tested as she grappled with the quest for home and belonging, realising how much she needs community and relationships, while pushing them away. Praise for One Woman Walks EuropeLoveReading"e;An incisive and moving tale that demonstrates the power of walking as a means to connect with our fellow humans. Perfectly captures the ebb and flow of a solo adventure while interweaving the myriad challenges faced by Europeans across the continent."e; Lois Pryce

Textauszug

Journey Roots

I’ve walked 9,000 miles now, in two major journeys.

During a single decade I spent more than four years on foot.

‘Why?’ is usually the first question I get asked. ‘How many pairs of boots?’ and ‘How do you charge your phone?’ often come shortly after that.

It can feel insulting, as people look me up and down, their faces twisted in incomprehension, gaze running critically over my sweat-stained dishevelment, from the mad wisps escaping my ponytail down to my filthy boots. ‘What are you doing to yourself?’ I read in their eyes. ‘How can this possibly be worth the effort?’

It’s the hardest question to answer; if someone doesn’t already understand why months spent coaxing your body to walk thousands of miles, completely alone, crossing the wilds on your own strength, would be totally worth it, then how do you find the words to convince them?

People only see the huge challenge of living for months at a time with all my possessions on my back, post-cancer, raising charity money, walking intense journeys of thousands of miles. They don’t understand how I can be capable of it, how I could even conceive of such a thing.

My huge journeys didn’t come out of nowhere, they have always been part of a progression. Don’t start with a marathon, start with one small step, take a single action towards a distant goal, you can’t judge how far that movement will take you.

I don’t enjoy feeling misunderstood – it’s a familiar unpleasantness, my long-held ache of being an odd one out, the weird kid. So when people ask why, it’s easiest to say, ‘Because I felt like it,’ without attempting to shift the buried stone that is their lack of understanding.

I get tired of trying to convince people who don’t understand the reward for all this effort. Of course it’s worth it, it’s the greatest experience I’ve ever had.

Everyone has dreams, don’t they? To ride a horse across an open plain. To learn the trapeze. ‘What if I was a rally driver?’ we say to ourselves, and then carry on with the washing up. Most people see life in terms of qualifications, career, relationships, children, financial commitments; which wind up being a series of distractions from dreams.

I’ve always been one for the ‘what if…?’ What if we climbed that derelict crane on the way home from the pub? What if I bought a fire engine in an online auction? What if we glued shut the locks of every shop in town as a protest against capitalism? What if we hung some sheets off the rugby posts and showed a film out on the rec?

I’m not so good at keeping my nose to the grindstone of a steady job, but I do come up with some brilliant flights of fancy.

Where most people’s ‘what ifs?’ dissolve back into the bong water of their stoner years, somehow I kept doing mine.

What if I walked the length of that river in Spain?

What if I kayaked the length of the Danube?

What if I walked to hospital?

These were my adult urges and I followed my nose and did them, allowing myself to become more spontaneous, masochistically testing myself and discovering my strength, showing myself who I was in a way I’d never been able to discover in the eyes of others.

 

Kayak east, walk west. That was my original idea, back in 2011.

I’d been travelling a couple of years by then, bumming around in Spain, working small survival jobs to save money for the next escape. I had kayaked the length of the Danube in a whirlwind of day drinking and beach picnics, experiencing an ill-advised affair with a controlling Serb and a near drowning, all as the kilometre markers counted down from 2,500 to 0. Everyone else went home at the river mouth, but the Serb and I continued to kayak south along the Black Sea coast and the journey finished with a mind-bending twenty-two-hour final stretch from Mangalia, Romania down to Varna, Bulgaria. We tied the kayaks behind a friendly yacht to ride the waves as aquatic hitch-hikers, then, from the safety of the boat, watched them submerge into a choppy moonlit sea as we rounded Cape Kaliakra. After hours of fighting to save my belongings from the seabed, I stepped onto the harbourside barefoot, all my shoes lost to the water.

Once I mustered the guts to send the Serb packing, I found a housesit in a remote Bulgarian village at the end of a back road on the autumnal brown Ludogorie plateau, planning to walk home to Wales the following spring.

But that walk never happened. I chopped a winter’s worth of wood, hitch-hiked home for a supposedly brief Christmas visit, and then life lurched in a new direction with a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Sleeping off New Year’s Eve 2012 on a friend’s sofa, I mentioned a strange feeling in my belly, wondering out loud about my sudden inability to bend or sit comfortably. The friend advised a doctor’s visit and, fresh from the athletic peak of months spent outdoors kayaking thousands of kilometres, I thought I’d tick off a quick check-up before disappearing back to more adventures in Eastern Europe. But one GP referral led to another, then scans led to blood tests led to consultants, and six weeks later I underwent major abdominal surgery to remove an ovarian tumour. All my adventures, the travelling, hitch-hiking, kayaking, had meant total freedom to me, and I reeled in the life-limiting aftermath of a sudden cancer diagnosis, major surgery, and the vulnerability of facing a serious illness while staying on a friend’s sofa.

The only fixed commitment in my life became a sequence of hospital check-up appointments, a schedule of blood tests and scans stretching a full five years into the future, longer than I had ever been able to imagine my fragmented life before. The appointments were both security against the return of malignancy and a restrictive net, keeping my hitherto free life oscillating from a fixed point in time and space in a way it hadn’t for years. To recover, I moved to Machynlleth and I walked. It was the simplest, most accessible way to recover my health. Eventually, six months post-diagnosis, I decided to follow the River Severn from the source near my home down to Bristol where I had my hospital appointments. Wild camping as I walked, this 400-mile journey down the Severn and up the Wye made me feel normal again. I still could get out there and challenge myself, even after cancer’s attack on my body and mind. That first walk to hospital led, a year later, to a 3,700 mile walk across Wales, between cancer check-ups, a story told in my first book, One Woman Walks Wales.

After a whirlwind few years, where my only life plan was to respond to the challenge directly in front of me, I faced a sudden absence of direction as I came to the end of the Welsh journey.

Walking across Europe felt like the simplest thing to do next. It gave me a fully-formed plan to throw myself into, without my truly stopping to question what I was taking on.

Quite often, because I’m not always a very happy person and I express that in my writing, people think I have walked all those miles to seek or escape something; it’s a simplistic reduction of such a complex journey. I had a pretty awful time when I was a child. There was violence in my home and then there was neglect, both emotional and physical. I spent most of my childhood being afraid and anxious, or frantically trying to pretend I was fine. I felt isolated from every child around me who seemed to be happy and functional, who didn’t have their own overshadowing horror of a derelict, non-functional home life. As I grew up into a traumatised adult, with an internal void where any adequately loved child’s sense of self would be, I had no idea who I was and made painful, bad decisions – of man, of education, of job. I dropped out of school and wound up at age 25 with two A levels gained through evening classes, and low level work experience in social care and office admin.

I don’t feel it’s the presence of these awful things that drove me to walk thousands of miles, it’s the space they left in my life.

The artist Andy Goldsworthy goes for a solitary walk most days and makes what he calls ‘interventions’ with the land, creating art from sticks, leaves, stones or ice. He plays with nature, forming shapes from organic materials that are both completely natural and could never exist without him.

The works that make me pause the longest are when he creates absences, deliberate voids. He will pick long shafts of dry grass that can stand straight, piercing the strong stems with thorns to make a screen that hangs in the air, balanced against the ground, a tree trunk or a low hanging branch, vulnerable to the breeze. The centre of the screen is left deliberately empty; where the pieces end, there forms a circular hole. Negative space. Absence, that is also potential.

My walking journeys weren’t a long-imagined choice, but as I grew from unresolved childhood trauma into an adulthood that was too messed up to fill successfully with the creation of babies or a career or...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.3.2025
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Biography • Bosnia • Bulgaria • Croatia • European • France • introspection • Italy • Kyiv • Montenegro • Nature writing • Romania • serbia • Slovenia • Spain • Survival • Travelogue • UK • Ukraine
• ISBN-13: 9781916821095 / 9781916821095