Red Széll

Well, some people went down to the British Museum to see the looted antiquities for themselves.

But there are a lot of people went on their cook's tours to go out to the Nile and experience the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza themselves.

And, you know, it should inspire us to want to go and push our boundaries.

It's a tough one, isn't it?

Because most of the world has been explored.

And a lot of what people like me and you are doing now is retracing the steps of other worlds.

of former adventurers.

But actually, we touched on him very briefly last week, a nature writer, an adventurer called Robert McFarlane, whose last two books have been to places where you and I will probably never go.

Underland explores...

caves and bunkers and tunnels that have been excavated deep underground and harks back to our fascination with going underground, either thinking that we're getting closer to Hades or the afterlife.

Or for safety.

Or for safety, indeed.

You know, remember that Naples is 7000 years old and the oldest parts of Naples are the catacombs, the underground caves where people used to live.

And wow.

And and.

And Robert McFarlane is going there specifically to try and find the lost nature, the nature, the natural world that we have superimposed with our own 21st century ideals and the exploitation of natural resources.

And he's trying to go...

for a quieter, less busy life, a little bit like R.C.

Shaw, but also to see where things went wrong when we stopped believing that we were part of nature and thought that we were the lords of nature.

So, yes, I'd say he's possibly the greatest travel writer of his and our generation because he puts a new spin on an old trope.