Sara Wheeler

The strangest landscapes are close to home

Nick Hunt explores Europe’s weird diversity — from tundra to primeval forest to parched desert to grassland steppes

Europe’s only true desert in Andalucia, south-eastern Spain [Alamy]

This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so much as a book of fantasy: four small pilgrimages into imagination’. In its pages Nick Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on a raw white onion and meditates both on what remains and on what we have lost.

Outlandish is divided into four parts, each covering a short walk through a uniquely unusual landscape: Arctic tundra in the Cairngorms; a remnant of primeval forest straddling Poland and Belarus (‘the closest thing that Europe has to a true jungle’); the continent’s ‘only true desert’, in Spain’s south-eastern Andalucía; and the grassland steppes of Hungary.

What unites the four? ‘Each seemed to belong to another part of the world,’ writes Hunt, ‘or even to another historical or geological era’. While describing these places minutely he uses them to take the reader further: ‘This is a book about places that transport.’ Elsewhere he calls his destinations ‘portals to elsewhere — exclaves not only of place but of deep time’.

Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on raw onion and meditates on what we’ve lost

Hunt, whose two previous books also cover European walks, quotes judiciously from sources ranging from George Mon-biot and the Aberdonian poet Nan Shepherd to an actual shepherd, the 18th-century James Hogg. He is good on myth and folklore, fragments of which he embeds (concerning Am Fear Liath Mòr, for example, the Big Grey Man of Scotland’s Ben Macdui). Similarly, he takes an agreeable canter in each of the quartets through local and national history. In this way the prose switches nimbly from the wide-angle lens to the close-up.

In Poland, the age-old conflict between man and nature takes centre stage.

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