British Pilgrimage: On This Holy Island With Oliver Smith

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What makes a place sacred, and can you find spiritual transformation without traveling thousands of miles? Why do ordinary English villages and Scottish islands continue to draw seekers from around the world? Award-winning travel writer Oliver Smith talks about British pilgrimage sites from Lindisfarne to Iona, and Walsingham to Glastonbury, and how these ancient places still draw even secular pilgrims today.

Oliver Smith is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain.

• The double lives of pilgrimage places, and how ordinary locations can offer transcendent experiences
• Lindisfarne’s tidal causeway
• The tension between commercial tourism and genuine spiritual seeking at sacred sites
• Iona’s remote Scottish island setting and the challenging journey required to reach it
• Walsingham’s remarkable history from medieval powerhouse to modern multicultural pilgrimage destination
• Why Glastonbury might be Britain’s best pilgrimage
• The philosophy of traveling deeper not further, and finding extraordinary meaning in familiar places

You can find Oli at OliverSmithTravel.com

You can find more Pilgrimage Resources here, as well as my book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Oliver Smith. Hi Oli.

Oli: Hello, how are you doing?

Jo: Oh, it’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Oli is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, which we are talking about today. It’s a fantastic book.

Now, Oli, I wanted to get straight into it. So you say in the book, although you’ve traveled all over the world, you say quote from the book,

“What interested me now were those places that promised a kind of travel beyond what could be charted on an ink or pixel map.”

So I wondered if you could start with that, because you’ve been to all these tick list travel places. What about those that are these soulful journeys?

Oli: I guess what really interests me is that a lot of these places that feature in the book, they sort of live double lives, you know?

If I pick one at random, or one near where you are in the country. If we think about Glastonbury for example, it’s fascinating because people go there with such huge expectation. For some people it’s a place that unlocks other worlds to them. The tor might be a portal to some world of the fairies or some world of Arthurian legend, or it might be something to do with Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus Christ walking in Somerset and that old legend, you know, so much is invested in it.

Yet at the same time, Glastonbury is a place where if you go to the high street, there’s a Boots. There is a pub selling the usual repertoire of lagers and warm beers and Nobby’s Nuts behind the bar, you know, these places. I think all of them, to some degree in the book, they are ordinary, mundane places that people live in and people pass by every day.

But then they offer, they promise a kind of an extra level, which is detectable to some people and isn’t to others. So it is that kind of duality. I think what really interested me when I was writing this book.

Jo: Yeah, and I guess, well it’s almost a bigger question because when you look at your career as a travel writer and you mentioned their expectation, which I think is a fantastic word for so much of travel, you could pick any of the tick list places in the world and say, well, you know, that would be amazing. And then perhaps it’s not.

I always think of Venice because I went to Venice one winter and it flooded and it stank and it was meant to be amazing, but it wasn’t. So I did really just wonder like —

Why write a pilgrimage book when you have traveled so many wonderful places?

Oli: I think one thing that can be said about all the places I’ve visited in this book is that there are places where you learn an awful lot about humanity and the human condition.

People often gravitate to pilgrimage places at these kind of weightless moments of their lives when they’re sort of on a hinge. Perhaps they’ve lost someone who is dear to them. Perhaps they’ve been made redundant. Perhaps they’re looking for direction, they’re going through a rite of passage.

But they are often people who are quick to tell you their story. They’re quick to open their heart. And I found myself getting in such deep and involving and fascinating conversations with people.

I think my pilgrimage book is possibly a little bit different to a lot of the other ones that are out there. It’s not really about me. I’m more of a kind of witness perhaps. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that these places didn’t have some magic that I felt on some level. But I think it is primarily about looking at these 12 places, sort of different characters as well as being character places – they are rich in characters themselves.

So yeah, I think you will have the best conversations if you go to wherever it might be. Walsingham on a pilgrimage day, or Stonehenge solstice or whatever it might be.

Jo: Well one of the places that you went is Lindisfarne and I love that you slept in the rescue box. Now I’ve walked across the sands. It was one of the highlights of the St. Cuthbert’s Way. I had just a wonderful time.

Tell us about the crossing to Lindisfarne

Oli: I think what makes Lindisfarne really interesting is its geography. That tidal element to Lindisfarne is something that’s not entirely unique, because you also get it at St. Michael’s Mount. You also get it at a couple of Holy Islands in the Severn Estuary, I think as well. But on that scale, the idea of taking a walk of three miles across a path that twice a day is completely submerged, is quite a wonderful thing.

And I wrote in the book that I think that path has many lessons. The idea that you only have a finite amount of time. The idea that you need to make the best of that time, that’s something that’s instructive for life on a much bigger level.

But I think probably what’s more interesting is the element of vulnerability there. You know, the idea that you are walking across the sea and the sea will be coming back for you very shortly, and you run the risk every time you step onto that path.

And it’s fascinating how there’s this sort of perpetual drumbeat through the summer of stories of people getting stuck on the causeway. It can be someone who often has got some quite flashy car and they think they can go straight through it. And then they go in the drink sort of halfway across. It’s also quite often people who are from countries where there aren’t tides. So people from central Europe, even the Mediterranean, you know, people sort of drive halfway across the causeway and they think it’s a car parking space, and they go for a little wander and they come back and the sea’s risen again. And suddenly their car is steering wheel deep in water.

But there’s so much biblical symbology in that, you know, the idea of the floods, the idea of the seas parting for Moses. I think all of that kind of echoes very slightly around the Lindisfarne Causeway, both the tarmac road and the Pilgrims Way. I think all those things are important.

I mean, I guess the other thing to say is the start of it all, Saint Aidan chose Lindisfarne because of this tidal rhythm. Because there’s these hours where the island is closed off from the world and the monks there would be in their solitude. They would be praying. And then there are those hours where the door opens in a way and they can go out into the world. They can spread the word. So it’s not an accident that the monastery is situated there.

I think the one thing that is absolutely extraordinary about Lindisfarne that just doesn’t get spoken about enough is that almost every weekend or every other weekend in summer. Maybe that’s a bit too much. Maybe every other weekend or once a month, something like that, a car will go under in the causeway and these people will be in the car. The water will be going up, they’ll be calling the RNLI, they’ll probably be in a panic. RNLI will turn up in their lifeboat and then they’ll fish them out and they’ll go back to the sea houses and their car will be absolutely kaput.

And there’s even a cottage industry. There’s a little garage by the causeway that seems to – I mean, it seemed to me that their business was essentially going out there, picking up the car and dragging it back.

But in living memory, there’s no record of anyone ever having drowned. You see how fast that water moves and you see how dangerous it can be. And you can see how clueless people are. And there were a few people who did sort of weigh it over in their minds and say to me, well, there is, that is almost miraculous. The fact that nobody has ever come a cropper there in living memory, or even, I think even longer than that. I think there was sort of a muttering of something happened a hundred years ago. But it’s quite extraordinary how that’s the case.

Jo: So I gotta come back to the box. Because we can picture this in our mind. So just explain what the walk looks like and what is the box and the poles and everything.

Oli: Sure, sure. Sorry, I got carried away there. So you go across the causeway and say you’re going out at low tide, it sort of looks almost like a little bit of a desert. And then you’ve got the two routes, the Pilgrims Way, which is the walking path, which sort of goes in a straight line, and then the metal causeway, which is for cars.

And on both of them you find these shelters. On the Pilgrims Way, it almost looks a bit like a tree house without a tree as it were. This sort of rickety, kind of slightly precarious platform on stilts that’s designed that, if you get caught by the tide, you can rush up there and you can wait it out.

But on the metal causeway where the cars are, I think just by the deepest point, but just by the point where people tend to get stuck, they’ve essentially put what looks like what looks like a garden shed on stilts. And that hovers by quite a deep channel. So it is this really weird thing that looks like someone’s sort of taken their garden shed from B&Q or from Homebase or wherever, and they’ve propped it on four concrete legs and stuck it sort of up in the sky. Almost like the umpire at Wimbledon or something. Do you know what I mean?

And if you go in there, you actually realize it’s a bit more sturdy than that. It’s actually built bespoke by the council, by Northumberland council, I think it was. And it’s quite cozy in there, but I went up there because I thought the most interesting thing about Lindisfarne for me was that betweenness, that sort of being halfway between being an island. Not an island, being a tidal island. And that kind of act of the water, severing it, cutting it off, and then retreating and it’s like this umbilical cord that kind of gets cut and then reattaches every – so, I mean, reattaches, it’s not particularly good metaphor, you know what I mean?

But yeah, I sat out there for however long it was, eight hours or something. I was really careful to make sure no one spotted me so they didn’t try and rescue me. But when you are up there, it is quite a kind of, you know, you’re at this gateway to a holy island. And Lindisfarne in high peak season is so crazy busy. But if you’re there, you know, in the middle. Kind of in the causeway on the gatehouse as it were. It’s just total silence, total peace, beautiful views and just seals kind of swimming up and down the channel. And you maybe there more than in the village. You get a sense of what it might’ve been for Cuthbert, for Aidan, for those saints who are so important to the story of Lindisfarne.

Jo: When I walked over, I heard this sound and I was like, what is that sound? And it was the seals singing, which apparently happens sometimes. And then of course it’s a bird sanctuary as well. So it is incredibly beautiful.

But you mentioned earlier about the duality of these places, and you did mention there that the village is really busy, and this is one of the interesting things about pilgrimage in general. There is an industry and I guess there always was, you know, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Obviously there’s always been an industry and I found that really hard, walking into the village with my wet boots and everything and my backpack and I was like, this is, and everyone looks at you weird because they’ve come off a coach.

How was that, with many of the places you visited, the industry versus the spirituality side?

Oli: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Because you said it was always there. I think it was always there. The commercial side of life is almost impossible to escape in pilgrimage locations.

I mean, one example I often talk about is if you go to the square that marks the finishing line of the Camino and you see these people gathering there. And they’re often in extremely heightened states and some of them are almost euphoric. And it’s this extremely kind of beautiful, poignant moment.

And then there’s the cathedral, which is obviously extraordinary itself, but then parked between the pilgrims and the cathedral. There’s often one of those little sightseeing road trains. Do you know the one that’s sort of like halfway between a bus and a train and there’s someone on a loudspeaker and maybe it plays a little song and it might even have a smiley face on the front of it, but that’s standing between the pilgrims and the cathedral and is just evidence for me of just how people will spy a buck in places where people spiritually gravitate. And that’s always been the way I think.

I think it also applies to lots of things. It applies to souvenirs, trinkets, pilgrims’ badges, whatever it might be, rosary beads, these, I think these are the original gift shops in a way. You know, when pilgrims go somewhere and they want something to take the magic of that destination back with them.

But it also applies in terms of the commercial side of things. I think it is to do with, I mean, you said the Canterbury Tales, like, I think pilgrimage for many people is about boozing and about going out. And if you hear about those stories of Shikoku Japan, where pilgrimage for many people is just sort of a pretext to go out there and just live the high life and kind of see the world a bit and have some fun. That’s one strand of it. I’m not saying that’s definitive for many people. It is a really lofty endeavor. And for a lot of people, I think these two things kind of mingle, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not so comfortably.

But yeah, I think the commercial side of things, bathos, these things will always be there, I think.

These places they promise escape and transcendence on one level, but then on another level, totally fail to deliver that. And I think it’s worth being honest about that.

Jo: I think so too. And again, it comes back to what you said about expectation. And in fact, the only place I sort of found that solitude and nature was on the St. Cuthbert’s Way because it’s so remote, in terms of the walk, whereas then arriving at Lindisfarne.

But I wanted to ask you about somewhere else, which is Iona, because I haven’t been, and part of me is kind of scared because of these expectations. So you say in the book

“More than anywhere I traveled for this book, Iona seemed a place that prompted wild infatuations. Dreams drifted northward to settle on this little Scottish island.”

So tell us about Iona.

Oli: I think here again, it’s to do with geography. I mean, I think the fact is for most people in Great Britain, Iona will almost certainly be a long way away from where you live unless you happen to live on the island of Mull or Oban or wherever it might be. It’s somewhere that through our modern eyes is at one removed from the rest of the world.

You know, it’s an island off an island off an island. If you count Great Britain as well. It’s at the edge of, it’s the edge of the Ross of Mull. It’s also kind of quite, it has a different feel to the Isle of Mull, which it neighbors and which is the route there. It’s geologically different. It looks kind of different.

And the way it’s regarded by many people is, you know, this is one of the first Christian outposts in Great Britain, happening around the same time as Canterbury emerges and that it’s at the wild edge of the world. You know, that this kind of little perch on the cusp of the Atlantic, which is kind of untrue in terms of history. Because Iona was actually very well connected. It was close to Ireland in those times. The way of getting around was not by land, but by sea. And it was on a kind of fairly established network of sea roads.

But I mean, yeah, that doesn’t stop the fact that it’s sort of seen as a sort of wilderness pilgrimage in many ways to, and there is no way getting there is easy. You will have to get a ferry or you have to get to Oban for a start, which could be umpteen train connections through riding the West Highland line through beautiful glens, a ferry to Mull, another wild road across Mull, which is kind of only just very slightly wider than your car, possibly narrower. And then you get to a ferry, another ferry port. Then you get a lot. So by the time you got there, whether you like it or not, you’ve made a kind of pilgrimage of one sort.

So I think that those are some of the reasons why, I mean of, and of course it’s hugely historically significant. It’s where Saint Columba, one of those early Christian saints of the British Isles established his monastery, in whatever it was, the seventh century I think it was. It’s at the very beginning of the story. It has the same elements as many pilgrimage sites across Britain, which is they were destroyed by reformations of one kind or another. And so that, you know, the ruins are often part of it.

And some people might find that kind of disappointing. Perhaps people from a Roman Catholic background might go there and see things being smashed to rubble, but I think perhaps in England we’re a bit more conditioned to find some kind of poetry in that, when we think of Tintern Abbey or Glastonbury Abbey or great monasteries like Rievaulx and Fountains and places like that.

They almost have their own kind of majesty in decay. And there’s an element of that I think about Iona. When you get there and you just sort of see these kind of slightly weathered. Pieced back together, Christian crosses. There is certainly some, yeah, there’s something stirring about all those things, I think.

Jo: And I guess one of the other things about it is where it is, physically as you said, so for people listening who don’t know the geography sort of very northwest. Realistically, you’ve got a lot of weather arriving, so, and you, I think you were there for a week, right?

How was the weather? How was that wildness around it?

Oli: Yeah, I mean it’s one of those places that you go and you can go and stand on a west facing cliff and you’ll have the kind of entire Atlantic blowing up down your face and you sort of almost get this kind of facelift from quite how intense it is. And that’s hugely stimulating.

And some people in the community there, of community with a big C that religious community in Iona Abbey today, someone said that’s almost like an image of God, this kind of sea, which is all powerful, which is vast and unknowable and it has that kind of element of the divine, of the almighty about it, I’d say. That’s certainly part of it.

And then the origin story of Iona, of St. Columba coming from Ireland. Sailing in this tiny little coracle across these insanely wild seas. These are kind of real, Channel Five trawler program seas where they’re just flinging around boats and it’s all rags of white surf. It’s not something we’re used to if you live near the English Channel or the North Sea or even the Irish Sea, they’re not quite on the same scale. I think all those things are part of Iona’s appeal, you know? I mean, it is a hugely historically significant place. There’s no two ways about it.

Jo: I like that kind of, we can’t control the weather and we can’t control God, and we’re sort of trying to find that in that place.

I also want to ask you about Walsingham because there was a point in history when it was a super, super famous place.

And I would bet that many people listening, probably most people listening to this, have never heard of Walsingham. So you say it’s unique in Britain in being a tiny village, shouldering the weight of its holy past. Tell us about that.

Oli: Yeah, I mean it’s a little village in Norfolk, which is sort of, I mean it’d be wrong to say Norfolk is remote in the context of England, but it’s a little bit more out the way. It’s kind of this bit of part of this bit of land that sticks out into the sea that incorporates a few, a couple of other counties as well. And it’s kind of a bit of a holiday heartland as well. Some lovely beaches there. And has a lot of very, very pretty kind of villages with flint, these kind of flint on the facade that makes all the houses kind of quite sparkly and lovely in a way.

But it’s fascinating that sort of in the midst of this kind of quite quintessentially English, slightly Miss Marple-esque landscape. There’s a lovely little village, which at the dawn of the, well, no, actually, was it 1061 something? There was an apparition of the Virgin Mary before a Saxon noblewoman. That’s a long time before other sites of other more famous sites of Marian apparitions, like Lourdes, like Fatima, like Medjugorje in Bosnia. This is a good several centuries before all of those.

And yeah, the fact is that this tiny little village was one of the kind of major pilgrimage sites of Christendom. It was ranked alongside Canterbury, and kind of only a few pegs below Rome, Santiago, it was mentioned in the same breath as Jerusalem by some people that, you know, people would go to this little village, that there would be royal pilgrimages there, kings would be going there.

And then suddenly, the English reformation happens. And this little place experiences the same fate as all the pilgrimage destinations in England at that time. These monasteries are all taken apart, smashed to bits. The icons, the shrines, are destroyed. Suddenly this sort of sleepy village goes back to being sleepy again for another 400 years or so.

And it was only at the dawn of the 20th century, where the local vicar, Alfred Hope Patten. He decided to kind of resurrect it in a small way. And so when you go to Walsingham today, it’s a place that kind of, you know. Its sanctity is originally medieval. Originally about a thousand years ago there was this Marian apparition, but then you go there and everything looks like something from the start of the 20th century.

The church sort of looks almost a bit like a kind of early BBC building or something. And the shrine is conspicuously quite new and shiny and is only, you know, only less than a hundred years old. And that this place has sort of had this sort of second life after its sort of renaissance at the start of the 20th century.

I mean, the counterpoint now is that obviously with the decline of church going that fewer and fewer people are going there. I mean, in the 1930s, there were special trains laid on from London, taking people there. Right through the 20th century, coach loads of people would go from their home parish on pilgrimage there. And now those numbers are dwindling. COVID dealt a big blow to the place. And now it’s just sort of quietly kind of ticking along.

The really fascinating thing for me about Walsingham is how it is, you know, almost, I mean, like you said, a lot of English people will not have heard of this place. And even people in Norfolk will probably not have heard of this place.

But if you go there, you will find like large numbers of Latin American people who happen to be working in London, you’ll find huge numbers of Tamil people, from Birmingham or from the Midlands, even from London, who, I mean, the biggest pilgrimage to this place now is the Tamil pilgrimage. Where these fields fill up with cars and this place that’s in the middle of Norfolk. It’s in the middle of kind of Brexit land and a large majority of people, they’re kind of white, Anglo-Saxon people. And then suddenly there’s this very highly diverse and really quite wonderful little village in the middle of it all. I think that’s something quite lovely.

Jo: And I wonder, because you said it looks quite modern and you also mentioned there the decline in church going, but actually there is a renaissance in pilgrimage. And people do like visiting. I mean, I’m not a Christian and I’ve done several pilgrimages and I feel an attraction to the ruins and the great cathedrals and these things.

I haven’t been to Walsingham, I’m not attracted to it because maybe it’s too modern. Do you think that’s maybe one of the reasons it hasn’t come back like some of the other places?

Oli: Yeah, hugely. I think that’s really interesting. How some pilgrimage places will speak to people of kind of less certain faith and others don’t.

I mean, someone asked me the other day for a piece they were writing what I consider to be Britain’s foremost pilgrimage destination now. The classic answer would’ve been Canterbury. Or indeed, Walsingham would’ve been a candidate for a lot of British history. And then, you know, Lindisfarne is also important, but I think even though it’s kind of second tier in the kind of more historical stakes, I think Glastonbury is the biggest pilgrimage destination now in Britain. Just because it means so many different things to different people. It is of importance to Anglican and Catholic communities. But it also brings in neopagan new age people. It brings in people who are looking for some kind of nebulous idea of nationhood as well. Those Arthurian legends that somehow this place has a kind of seed of an origin story about Britain embedded within it.

But also, I mean, I think there’s a logistical argument that the biggest gathering in Britain, the Glastonbury festival, which happens just a few miles down the road and a few days ago. I mean, that’s a pilgrimage for many people. If you look deep. If you kind of look a little bit more closely, you can see that those, some of those things, things like the pyramid stage, that was kind of an energy center. And there are pilgrimage elements to the Glastonbury Festival today.

So, I mean, yeah, I mean, Walsingham, it doesn’t have that ancient kind of draw of Iona, it doesn’t have the wilderness feel of Lindisfarne. It’s not got an enormous cathedral at the end of it, like Canterbury. And accordingly, while pilgrimage is in renaissance in many ways, it’s being left behind to some extent. I think, relative to those other places.

Jo: So I wanted to also ask you, so you have almost a call to action at the end of the book about “finding Jerusalem in our own backyard to travel deeper, not further to break through the crust of the familiar to find the fantastical.” So I think this is really important and you do mention changes in attitude to travel perhaps with climate change and things being a bit different now. So how can we do that though?

How can we travel deeper, not further and see things differently?

Oli: That’s a very good question. I think the way I saw things differently in this book is sort of being in the right place at the right time.

If I kind of give an example of that, I mean, every time I, well, not every time. Because sometimes you take the M4, but a lot of times when you go on holiday to Devon and Cornwall, you drive down the A303 and there’s that horrible sort of choke point near Amesbury and traffic’s crawling really slowly and it’s really annoying. And you look out the window and you’re like, oh, there’s Stonehenge. And you’re like, oh, hi Stonehenge. Then you sort of push on down the road and then you don’t think about it again.

Or you might go there on a school trip or something like that. We might kind of go with your family and walk past the barrier. And you’re like, oh, this is very interesting. I think that had been my attitude to Stonehenge until I started reading about its modern history as a place of gathering at Solstice about the free festivals and visited there on one Summer Solstice event.

And you see that its history for many people is not abstract. That it is a kind of, it is not a heap of old stones. It’s a temple for many people. And the historical sources suggest that people can to a large extent make it what they want it to be. And they do. And the lack of a dogma, the lack of a creed about that place means that you are free to kind of complete the picture yourself.

And I didn’t know, I mean, maybe was a bit too young to know about the free festivals of the seventies. The Battle of the Beanfield where Stonehenge was sort of closed off to the outside world because of the parties that were going on there. And I didn’t realize that it was kind of reinvented, rediscovered as a shrine about 40, 50 years ago and now it’s just sort of ticking along, but you can still get a sense of those people for whom it was a kind of, it was a sort of. They were holy stones.

And that had never crossed my mind until I’d been to some solstice. That I’d read the sources around it. And I think, yeah, that’s part of it. Just learning more, speaking to more people. Waiting until the tourist tour buses have thinned, and when the sun started going down, perhaps, or whatever it might be. Those are often the moments when you start to see a little bit more clearly the magic that some of these places possess and were chosen for in the first instance.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is the Books and Travel podcast.

What are some of the books you recommend about pilgrimage or British travel?

Oli: Okay. Yeah, probably if I was to pick one book about British travel of the last 10 years that kind of opened my eyes a bit more widely. It’s probably not particularly original answer, but probably the The Book of Trespass. I think that’s just a fantastic book that, you know, so much of kind of landscape writing and nature writing is so polite and so deferential and just something that turns that on its head. I really like it. I think it was really fantastic and so much fun. It was a really great book. So I really enjoyed that.

In terms of pilgrimage writing, I really, I’ve not quite finished it yet, but I really enjoyed Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World by Kathryn Hurlock, I think I like it because it’s very kind of clear-eyed and sees through an awful lot of the kind of cloud of mystery around these places to just sort through historical facts. That’s a really fun one.

British kind of landscape books. I mean, I would say probably my, those kind, you know, I think probably every writer has a few kind of holy texts of their own. And probably, again, it’s not hugely original, but for me it’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which obviously only has like a few pages of England before it starts hightailing over to Spain. But that kind of landscape around the Slad Valley and I guess not very far from you. Really.

Jo: We should say that’s Laurie Lee if people don’t know.

Oli: Yes, of course. That’s another really, that kind of is writing about a place where, you know. It kind of almost jumps out the page at you really, and you feel that you’re there in some ways. I really love that kind of classic British travel writing that came out of the kind of seventies and eighties, those are maybe not quite as fashionable now, the kind of Bruce Chatwin and Patrick Leigh Fermor and all that stuff, but that’s what really kind of inspired me when I was young. And I know that there, there’s a lot of those kind of books are kind of quite flawed in many ways and a lot of stuff is made up.

Jo: Oh, we are all flawed.

Oli: We are all flawed. But yeah, those guys get away with it because they could do it so brilliantly and make it feel so real. But yeah, those books are all hugely important to me. I think you can often tell quite how important a book is by how well thumbed it is. But for me, I’m just looking up on my shelf now and I think the most battered book up there is Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry. That’s like another really kind of sacred text for me. Sorry, I rattled on.

Jo: Oh no. We love books. That’s why we’re here.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Oli: My website is oliversmithtravel.com. And my social media handles are OliSmithTravel on Instagram and Twitter.

Jo: Brilliant. Well thanks so much for your time, Oli. That was great.

Oli: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for reading the book.