Earlier this year John Hillaby, a 52-year-old Yorkshireman, set out to walk through Europe. He has done this sort of thing before: a 1,000-mile walk through Africa to Lake Rudolph in 1960; a 1,100-mile walk through Britain from Land's End to John o'Groats in 1965. This year it was to be 1,400 miles, from the flatlands of Holland to the rocky coast of the Mediterranean
He walks 20 to 30 miles a day for day after day, observing the countryside and the people through the trained eye of a journalist and scientist. To most people he meets en route he is an incomprehensibly eccentric Englishman. But how eccentric is it to want to be free; to sleep out on a carpet of flowers in an Alpine meadow; to escape from what Hillaby calls 'the plastic bag in which we live'?
(Colour)