The Earth Beneath My Feet and On Sacred Ground: Andrew Terrill
Published by Enchanted Rock Press, 2021, 357 pages / 2022, 397 pages.

“Finding places that called as though I belonged was one of the reasons I’d started The Walk. … In truth, I was walking to be somewhere, not get somewhere. My goal was to seek out the continent’s special places of natural wonder, then lose myself within them.” (On Sacred Ground)

On 2 June 1993, Andrew Terrill fell down a mountain—to be precise, down the Hohtürli Pass of the Bernese Oberland in the Swiss Alps. Miraculously, he survived with a fractured ankle, and cuts and bruises. The near-death experience changed his life. His suburban existence back home in the UK felt pointless; it was how he was expected to live, not how he wanted to live. As a stammerer, he was not always comfortable socially. The only place where he really lived were the mountains.

After he recovers from his fall, Terrill decides to walk 7,000 miles across Europe, keeping to the mountains and wild places as much as he can. He starts from Calabria, going up the length of Italy, through Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and finally through Norway to North Cape its far end. He takes his time over the journey—his aim is not to rush from one end of the continent to the other but to enjoy it. As he puts it in The Earth Beneath My Feet, “To do nothing, to rest in observant stillness for hours on end, was a large part of why I was walking. … As I saw it, the journey wasn’t about covering ground and getting somewhere—it was also about being somewhere.”

It would take him a year and a half, from 1 May 1997 to 18 October 1998 (he explains in an afterword why it took him so long to write the books). He dedicates his walk to two organizations that work with the homeless in the UK—The Passage and The Cardinal Hume Centre—and helps to raise money for them. The first book, The Earth Beneath My Feet, covers the leg from Calabria to Austria, and On Sacred Ground takes us from Austria to Norway.

The beginning of the walk is much harder than he has imagined. His starting point is the village of Melito di Porto Salvo in Calabria, Italy. The maps that he has of the Apennines are of no help, in fact they mislead him; the sottobusco (undergrowth) makes progress difficult; and he is accompanied by clouds of black flies (including ones that bite) and mosquitos. The flies and mosquitos are a problem in the summer throughout his journey, so much so that he dubs himself Lord of the Flies. And then, there are warnings about the ‘Ndrangheta (the Calabrian Mafia) in the forest, either by the police (“criminali, molti criminali”) or, in one case, by two friendly men standing in front of pickup trucks, who are curious about Terrill’s trip. But when they realize the direction in which he is heading, they tell him in no uncertain terms that it is not a good idea. “‘It is…ah…better you go another way.’… ‘Believe me,’ he said with real emphasis. ‘You should go another way.’” And so he does.

There are some wonderful moments. Terrill climbs up to the Corno Grande, the highest peak in the Gran Sasso, a massif in the Apennines, before dawn. When the sun rises, the light catches the rocks, making them luminous: “for a moment, I wasn’t standing on a mountain—I was perched on a pinnacle of pure light. … the new day touched other peaks one by one, painting their summits gold. It was like watching fires being lit one after another, a message of victory being relayed across the land.”

In Norway, he comes across a sign on the edge of the Trollheimen, a mountain range, at the entrance to a ravine, like a road sign warning of elks or falling rocks. “Pictured was a distinctive silhouette from Norse mythology: a massive, hairy, large-nosed being. Be warned, the sign declared, trolls ahead!”

In these books, Terrill reminds us that Europe, the continent we think of as densely populated with built-up areas, also has its wild places. As he says towards the end of his 7,000-mile walk, “Here it was beneath my feet again: the untrammelled Europe, the sacred Europe, showing no signs that others of my own species had ever visited it. … As I stepped gently I thought back to the journey’s many surfaces: to sun-baked soil and mulchy woodland floors, to loose sand and unyielding rock, to piney trails and glacial ice, to grassy meadows and boulder fields, to oozing bogs and snow in its many forms. How passionately I’d come to treasure all the natural surfaces of our richly textured living earth.”

Terrill makes for a wonderful companion—observant, funny, honest, and open to whatever nature throws at him. He carries on through circumstances most would find challenging, undaunted by thick snow, burning heat, dense undergrowth, and much else. He is rewarded by incredible scenery, the privilege of becoming part of the landscape, and the connections he makes with the animals and the humans he meets. His aim is to have no impact on the land he walks through, making it a point to leave his camping sites exactly as he finds them. His joy at being in nature is infectious—he cannot believe how lucky he is, going to bed under the stars and waking up in the morning in a forest or a winter wonderland.

Travel changes you, and the walk changes Terrill. You see him grow as a person over the journey. He lets you into his life, his anxieties and worries, and his joys. He does not shy away from describing the moments of despair that overtake him from time to time, when he feels alone and his undertaking seems impossible. By the end of the first book, I felt I knew him, and meeting him again in the second book felt like encountering an old friend.

These books are not only thoroughly enjoyable, but are a crucial reminder of the importance of nature and wild places in our lives. It is also a message of hope: Terrill writes about species being brought back from near extinction, and wild places being protected, although we still have a long way to go. We need to understand these places so we can better preserve them, both for us and for the generations that follow.

Read the Talking About Books interview with Andrew Terrill.