Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn as a Second Journey

This essay focuses on Nick Hunt’s travel book Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn (2014) as a text within the subgenre of travel writing which has been variously referred to as ‘intertextual journey’, ‘in the footsteps genre’ or ‘the second journey’. First, generic issues concerning this type of narratives in the context of contemporary travel writing will be discussed in order to prepare the ground for the analysis of the nature and variety of relationships existing between Leigh Fermor’s trilogy and Hunt’s travel book. This analysis will be carried out in the main part of the essay. In the concluding remarks the existence of a ‘symbiotic’ relationship between Leigh Fermor’s ‘host texts’ and Hunt’s ‘guest text’ will be argued for.