Book review: One Woman Walks Europe by Ursula Martin

Jon Gower

We continue our reviews of books shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award for 2026. This time we consider one of the titles in the Creative Non-Fiction category.

You can vote for the People’s Choice here. 

You’d expect a diary of a 5,500-mile trek from the edge of Europe all the way to mid Wales to be a blistering account, or an account of blisters, and it is that. But it is also so much more. It is the tale of a journey powered by both stubbornness and gritty determination as Martin traverses entire countries and crosses mountain ranges, encounters fierce dogs and faces all manner of wild weather, when she is ‘part of the land, to be equally lashed and wetted.’ It’s about the day-to-day trudge, the comfort of strangers and the quotidian decisions about where and how to sleep from night to night. 

Stubborness

It’s about loneliness, too and the tiring quest for human companionship as well as a description of Martin’s own personal, psychological life-journey, including a traumatic, violent upbringing and later dealing with cancer. But it’s that stubbornness that is the main subject and how it manages to keep her going, devoting herself ‘so utterly to an unusual goal’ and pushing on and on to completion. If she deviates in any way from the route she makes sure to return to her point of departure because ‘the original challenge I set myself had become the entire and only idea.’ That sort of stubbornness.

Adventure writer

One Woman Walks Europe is at one remove from the conventional travel book, often keeping description down the bare minimum. You need only compare Martin’s description of arriving in Venice with Jan Morris’ classic account to see how the former keeps it lean and matter-of-fact compared with the luxuriant, sensual writing of the latter’s arrival across the lagoons. Martin helps us out in this regard when she counts herself as one a band of ‘adventure writers’ such as Patrick Leigh Fermor who ‘skipped across Europe’, Irishwoman Dervla Murphy who ‘always had a wry tale of yet another broken bone’ and Rosie Swale, from Tenby, who ‘is made of pure steel.’ Martin more often stays in hedgerows rather than hotels, pitching her tent where she can.

Wolves and jackals.

Not that this compelling, humbling and totally uplifting book eschews describing landscapes and locales altogether: it’s more that Martin’s writing travels light, in keeping with the demands of her incredibly testing journey. Pack light. Move on. She only has 90- days to cross 400 miles of central Ukraine for instance and there are wolves in the night and yipping jackals in Bulgaria. There are some brief and brilliant sketches of place, such as when she camps in a ‘barcode stand of white birch, among bare lines of black and white, where I was warm and happy in the patchy snow.’ Or there’s the view of an enormous river basin where ‘The vastness of this place manifested in a singing to me, a vibrating of light and air that was simultaneously too high and too low for me to hear anything more than a faint sensation. It was the quietest of roars, the gentlest of booms. This was not a place where humans stay – we only pass through.’ 

Energy versus pain

In order to pass through so many places Ursula Martin has to dig very deep into her inner resolve. As she explains: ‘A walk like this is a balance of energy versus pain. Small problems easily had big effects. Muscles tense from exertion? I wouldn’t slide into deep sleep. Not enough sleep? I would be tired and achy all day. Not enough to drink? Move immediately from dry mouth to blinding headaches.’ And there are times when she runs out of water altogether and days of complete and utter exhaustion when only an iron will levers her out of bed, or up off the forest floor in what is often the simplest of camps.  

What if?

Ursula Martin tells us that she has always been one for the ‘what if…? What if she climbed a derelict crane on the way home from the pub? What is she bought a fire engine in an online auction? What if she glued shut the locks of every shop in town as a protest against capitalism? After writing her first book One Woman Walks Wales she thought what if she walked across Europe? This book is the total answer, an exploration of what drives her on as much as what she achieved in doing so. It’s a cracking read and, in the very best way for the reader, utterly exhausting. Armchair travel is seldom this hard or rewarding.

One Woman Walks Europe by Ursula Martin is published by Honno and is available from all good bookshops.