Titles by Imprint
Category: Travel and The Great Outdoors
Across Country From Thonon To Trent
Rambles and Scrambles in Switzerland and the Tyrol
By Douglas W FreshfieldThis is a true ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure story of how three English schoolboys spent the summer of 1863 trekking through the Swiss and Italian Alps before conquering Mont Blanc. It is an utterly unique journal written by one of that party who would go on to become one of the great mountain and travel writers of the Victorian era and make a huge contribution to the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club. His name was Douglas William Freshfield.
This volume, which he arranged to have printed privately in 1865, was his first work of the eight he would eventually write and it is also his rarest because few know of its existence. As it was privately printed its circulation was small and it is not listed in any published bibliography of his known works. Essentially this is Freshfield’s ‘lost’ work.
In the narrative of this unique journal can be found the beginnings of the style and observational genius that would serve Freshfield well over the course of his writing career. The reader is engaged at once with the three young men as they begin their adventure and is bowled along as an unseen travelling companion through the high routes and passes, the valleys and gorges and is with them as they summit on Mont Blanc.
FROM THONON TO TRENT is not only an engaging and informative record of how privileged young Englishmen once spent their leisure time but also a rare memoir of a lifestyle long since gone but still worthy of reminiscence.
