Sean Rothery

When architect and ex-mountaineer Sean Rothery had to retire from his post as a lecturer at Dublin Institute of Technology, he attended one of those awful pre-retirement seminars, where a patronising doctor advised participants to take long walks, “at least two or three miles, down to the end of the pier in Dún Laoghire and back, for instance”. Whether or not this was really what made him decide to walk all the way across Europe the following year, it did at least give him the perfect hook with which to start his book...

Rothery describes walking the GR5 from Hoek van Holland to Nice in the spring and summer of 1994. Like most GR5 walkers, he started "at the boring end" in Holland, and thus had the built-in time challenge of getting to the Alps before the weather changed. He walked a few sections with friends and family or with other walkers he met along the way, but for most of the time he was on his own, and he frequently quotes from Hazlitt's essay on the pleasures of solitary walking (so frequently that you have to wonder after a while whether he really believes it...).

Unlike many people who write about long-distance walking, Rothery wasn't doing this sort of thing for the first time - he cycled across Europe as a student in the early fifties, and seems to have been a serious mountaineer until a bad accident in Switzerland in 1967 ended his climbing career. And judging by the Irish newspapers, he didn't hang up his boots after getting to Nice either!

The book struck me as a nice illustration of both the pleasures and the annoyances of long-distance walking. Rothery is good at conveying the pleasure he takes in some of the more attractive bits of the route. His architect's eye picks up details that many of us would miss, but all too often his experience seems to be defined much more by the inconveniences of the route: getting lost when the balisage (trail marking) gives out or is ambiguous, having to find a place to stay and a meal every night, having to carry on walking through countryside that doesn't interest him, having to face weather that would make most of us decide to stay indoors, and so on. There are sections of the route that read just like a continuous trail of miseries, where one hotel after another is awful, the country is dull and there is almost nothing to cheer him up except the occasional chat with another walker or a local. At those points you can't help thinking "why not just go and stay in a good hotel in one place and do walks as you feel inclined...?"… (altro)