Review: One Woman Walks Europe by Ursula Martin

Julie Brominicks

‘Over time, I realised they were creatures of habit and when their schedule was to eat at my camping spot that night, they would get agitated when they found me there. I was a squatter at their favourite lunch table, the one by the window, where they met every week at 1pm, so all the noise was them gathering to stare and chat shit about me, just loudly enough to make me uncomfortable.’

On reading this description of wild boars outside Ursula Martin’s tent, the accumulation of such brilliant observations finally overwhelmed me and I cried. Summoning the impartial perspective required of a reviewer is impossible, but I’ll try.

‘One Woman Walks Europe’ is the account of Ursula Martin’s journey on foot from Kyiv to Llanidloes where she lives. Her meandering wild-camping route through several countries and two lockdowns took more than two years and is wrought with beauty and insight.

Comparisons are irksome (I’m tired of publishers telling me they want something ‘more like The Salt Path’) but if you enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and (sigh) Raynor Winn’s equally excellent The Salt Path, you will love this book and be proud of it too, because Ursula Martin is here.

She lives in Llanidloes. She replies to messages. I saw her once in a bookshop.

And her book is beefier. Ursula Martin is a brand-new Brexit Brit ashamed of her country’s ‘refusal to join in.’ She walked across Europe from East to West, ‘the colonised to colonisers,’ bearing witness.

Ugliness

She reports ugliness where she finds it. Poverty. Abuse. Cigarette sellers on the border with Romania. The brain drain as people seek work in the EU. Empty towns in Bulgaria. Bosnia’s bullet holes. Germany’s sterility.

Most people she meets are kind. She believes in community and finds it. Everywhere she is offered coffee, booze or a bed (and occasionally a bonk).

Inevitably, reading about Ukraine now, is painful. ‘Trees bulge with hidden fruit, flinging forth their prayers for survival. There were people collecting food everywhere I went, preserving jars on sale in every village shop. In towns they rifled through drifts of fallen leaves to pocket hidden walnuts.’ Beautiful? Yes. Romanticized? Never. She really did walk through golden fields. People really did give her apples.

At times her gaze is ironic. I love this flip: ‘It was always faintly intimidating at first to be stared at both blatantly and subtly. Clothing was usually black, stubble abounded. Bulgarian men tended towards the round and hairy…’

And here: ‘They were there in the bar, older Bosnian Serbs, day drinking and chewing over their bitterness like Brexiteers in Wetherspoons.’

Two-way mirror

You need to have been there to make such statements. A good travel writer is a two-way mirror between reader and subject. In an era fragmented with prejudice and paranoia, has this role ever been more crucial? Yet all year, publishers have been telling me that travel writing doesn’t sell anymore, because nowadays anyone can go anywhere. But people don’t, in general, ‘go’ like Ursula Martin goes.

They don’t eschew carbon-intensive flights. They don’t wild-camp through winter. They don’t trust in strangers and stick up their thumb (she hitched to Kyiv). Your average globetrotter does not ask ordinary people about their circumstances, politics and war. Or conversely spend so long alone in the mountains they must clear their throat before speaking, or be brought to tears by the power and connectivity that surges when touching a tree.

And as Ursula Martin (clear-eyed about her privilege as a white British passport holder crisscrossing borders others are camped at) so frequently points out, not everyone can go anywhere.

We badly need new travel writing to make sense of our contemporary world. Kudos to Honno for being ahead of the curve.

She has difficulties. The frozen fingers, hip ache and deflating air-mat are truths in the odyssey that casts Ursula Martin as central character. They add grit and continuity to the narrative.

Unthinkable

Travelling like this is unthinkable to so many in Western Europe, whose commodities and experiences come shrink-wrapped. It’s not just foraging and navigation skills we’re losing that many Eastern Europeans still have. Friends of mine don’t know how to catch a bus.

Perhaps this is why, where travel writing does linger, personal journeys (ergo The Salt Path) are on trend. Every reader can relate to them, even if they baulk at actual travel. Ursula’s inner journey is as powerful as her outer one. Her childhood trauma and past toxic relationships are brought into focus by loneliness. It is hard to read how much she hurts at having no one to hold her. Perhaps it is telling she chose to walk home, to Wales, where she wants to be rooted.

Meanwhile I will probably never embark on my dream solo hike to Istanbul at the far edge of Europe. I have a loving husband and home, and as a consequence my journeys now are shorter.

By the time you read this, we will be walking the Camino de Santiago together; a bucket-list challenge for many, a scant few pages towards the very end of Ursula Martin’s epic quest.

It is emotional to find yourself a vicarious reader of the journey you wanted to make in the book you might have written; it is a gift.

Travel-writing giants

That is why this book means so much to me. Perhaps I can’t untangle myself enough to give you perspective. But I can tell you that one reason I cried upon reaching the bit about boars is because I was nearing the end. Like those by Dervla Murphy and Paul Theroux, this book is thick, and till then I’d been putting it down relishing how much was still left in a way I’d not done since reading those travel-writing giants. Yes I am talking about Martin, Murphy and Theroux in the same sentence.

‘Sorry but the bottom fell out of the travel writing market twenty years ago’ one respected English publisher told me recently. Bollocks to that. Buy this book.

One Woman Walks Europe by Ursula Martin is published by Honno Press and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops