Island Escape

Travel writer Robert Twigger goes adventuring in the Lake District’s sodden landscape

“Who doesn’t have a thing about islands?” writes Robert Twigger on page one of his terrific new book. The way he sees it, they haunt our imagination as places of opportunity to escape our everyday lives and have new adventures.

In this, as he acknowledges, he has been influenced since boyhood by Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons novels, where children get away from the adults and find freedom on the islands of the Lake District—all 36 of which he now sets out to visit.

In the past, Twigger has written acclaimed travelogues about the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains and the Sahara. With 36 Islands, he brings the same wide-ranging curiosity and intelligence to bear as he walks, paddles and kayaks through some of Britain’s most stunning, and sometimes still unspoiled, scenery.

He also takes full advantage of the “deceleration of time” that comes with mostly solitary journeying to ponder—among many other things—life as he approaches 60, determined not to turn into a curmudgeon (something, happily for the reader, he doesn’t always achieve). Meanwhile, we learn a lot about Ransome too: one of the few British authors to have played chess with Vladimir Lenin.