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TThe past few years have brought dramatic changes to our lives: Brexit, Covid lockdowns, climate change, high energy costs and the biggest and most brutal war in Europe since 1945. Rediscovering and reinterpreting the world for a new age. From 14-16 April, 10 of the UK’s best travel writers will come to Sherborne, Dorset to transport readers, listeners and both armchair and intrepid travelers to the four corners of the globe.
The Sherborne Festival of Travel Writing will be the first festival in England to be held exclusively for travel literature in recent years. At its heart is the idea and current theme of reaching the horizon. But how do you ensure compliance with the travel literature in a time when difficult personal finances and climate change loom over many of our travel plans?
“Because that’s what travel writing is all about,” replies Jay Griffiths, award-winning author and advocate for the rest of nature’s wild places. “He will not allow the world to become sclerotic, nationalistic. It opens up the world, feeds curiosity, imagination and wide horizons.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “True travel is not leisure, but as difficult as the grave or any human journey.” Colin Toubron, the keynote speaker at the event, spent months following the Amur River in Russia and China—walking, driving, horseback riding, or occasionally sharing boats with fishermen—to research his latest book. One of the writers nominated for this year’s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year notes that a contender spent a year cycling through Arab countries and Iran. Another Everest climbed; and another traveled by camel in remote areas of Morocco.
“Such commuters emit less greenhouse gases than a typical day in London,” says Toubron. “None of this is to dismiss the traveler; we often have to get to our first destination by plane. But this kind of work doesn’t discourage anyone from following us. On the contrary, readers sink into their seats and greet the traveler’s book to endure the journey themselves.”
Over the course of five months, Philip Marsden single-handedly paddled the beaches of western Ireland and Scotland for his book The Summer Isles. He tells me: “When I started traveling and writing – years ago – I was inspired by the fact that the world was a bigger and more amazing place than I had been led to believe. You just need to go beyond the known to hit the scale with the amazing and amazingly measured.
“I still haven’t caught that, but now there’s a new urgency. The environmental crisis is a global crisis and travel writing offers what it has always done, the full perspectives that travel allows: the interaction of people and places, the opportunity to observe the drama of the vast and changing natural world, as well as the reality of individuals affected by it. We are creatures of habit, even if we do our best to deny it.
Travelers, more than most, have seen the effects of climate change. So, as the organizer of the festival, I wanted to bring the world to people who can’t or won’t be able to travel abroad. Other speakers promoting the weekend include Sophie Roberts and Justin Marozzi, as well as the intrepid Sarah Wheeler, whose new book, Glowing Still, follows the journey of a female travel writer, and Anthony Sattin, whose inspired book-of-the-year nomads delve deep into the world to tell the stories of the wanderers who shaped our world. -Our stories, the unrecorded antiquity and the natural environment are included.
After newspaper promotion
“Ultimately, such travel connects us to each other in a more powerful and empathetic way than the Internet or mass festivals,” says Toubron. Although the world seems to be globalizing, its borders seem to be tightening, and travel is the antidote to one of the worst diseases of our time, demonizing the other.
That is the most important reason at the heart of the festival. In his new book, Timothy Garton Ash Homelands, he writes about Brexit as a “great failure”. In the episodes that followed and followed Brexit, the UK “lost something as important as freedom of movement or membership of the single market: at once the aspiration to be our national identity and something beyond our national identity.”
Britain is part of Europe because it is part of the world. Of course we are responsible for air travel. We must reduce our environmental impact in the time we are given on our planet. But, at the same time, we must not suppress our curiosity, our sense of adventure, our hunger for the new and the desire to connect with our neighbors. Much of the world’s travel has been opened up over the past century, and some of the passenger jet vapor trails can be seen as a bridge of communication between the people (especially after the industry implemented the necessary controls to reduce both CO)2 and non-CO2 aircraft emissions). We must all aspire to be something more than our national identity to build a better world.
Griffiths sums it up: “In terms of climate and air travel, my position is less holidays, more travel. Not using flights as a right to seek out the cozy comfort zone (with extra sunshine) but rarely as a privilege.
On some spring and summer nights hot air balloons float high above the chalk slopes of Dorset’s Purbeck Hills and Cranbourne Chase. Shadows lengthen into Blackmore Vale. So the festival’s poster features a balloon – not a plane or a gas-guzzling SUV – lifting travelers up to see a new horizon above the honey-coloured hamstone of the venerable Sherborne Abbey.
Rory McLean is the organizer of the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which takes place at Sherborne’s Powell Theater from April 14-16.. Special events include afternoon tea with authors. Charities include Children of Kashfi, which provides bilingual books aimed at educating young people, fostering tolerance, positive change and hope. Tickets for the week and single event can be booked on the festival website and on Eventbrite. His latest book Pravda Ha Ha: Truth, Lies and the End of Europe (Bloomsbury) is available from the Guardian Bookshop (£9.59).
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