Walking Home cover art

Walking Home

Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way

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Walking Home

By: Simon Armitage
Narrated by: Simon Armitage
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About this listen

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256 mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born.

Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs, and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.

Walking Home describes this extraordinary yet ordinary journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his way. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.

©2013 Simon Armitage (P)2013 Faber Audio
European History Poetry Travel Writing & Commentary

Critic Reviews

"He is diligent, prolific and wide-ranging. By balancing humour and gravitas, he generates great affection in his readers. If he is not careful, Simon Armitage will end up becoming a national treasure." (Mail on Sunday)

"Armitage has always been a wonderfully fluent writer, able to riff on almost any subject in either prose or poetry.... The result is a homage to an oddly old-fashioned Britain, full of glorious eccentrics and hearts of gold, but vividly believable for all that." (Financial Times)

"Armitage's great gift is his voice. He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking. It is funny but moving, quiet but strong." (The Observer)

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Fantastic

It was wonderful to walk with Simon on his poetic travels. Beautifully written and spoken.

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Walking Home - A listener's response.

Rather than a cheerful recount of his walk through the pennine way - designed to entertain an audience with humorous anecdotes of his rip roaring adventures, Walking Home - A Poet's Journey - represents Armitage's range of emotional highs and lows, celebrating both the potential sublime and banal that he encounters on his way- whilst still frequently finding humour throughout.

However, the reality is that this walk is a hard slog and it is Armitage's honest personal reflections on the walk, on his companions and on his varying moods and fears that is most engaging aspect. This book is not a recount of a journey but a mediation on one person's personal response to that journey.

Listening to Simon Armitage narrate is just an additional pleasure!

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