Exploring the psychology of pilgrimage, wilderness and walking, join us for a spellbinding, life-affirming journey across deserts, rainforests, and mountains, and into the human soul.

Unhappy in his office job, Robert Martineau craves an experience that will shake his feeling of inertia. Aged twenty-seven, he buys a flight to Accra, and begins to walk. He walks 1,000 miles through Ghana, Togo and Benin, to Ouidah, an ancient animist centre on the West African coast.

Martineau walks alone across desert, through rainforests, over mountains, carrying everything he needs on his back, sleeping in villages or on the side of paths, travelling shrine to shrine. Along the way he meets shamans, priests, local historians, archaeologists and kings. He begins to confront the lines of slavery and exploitation that binds his home to theirs. Through the process of walking each day, and the lessons of those he walks among, Martineau starts to find the freedom he craves, and to build connections with the natural world and the past.

Join us and discover his remarkable story.

Praise for Robert Martineau’s Waypoints:

‘Waypoints wonderfully explores how walking animates resilience in times of stress, anxiety and worry, illustrating, through personal experience, how the journey is often our collective human goal.’ Shane O’Mara, author of In Praise of Walking

‘Stepping out in the spirit of Bruce Chatwin and Rebecca Solnit, Robert Martineau ranges through forest and desert, literature and philosophy, in search of an answer to why we are drawn to wander. Although he walks over a thousand miles, Waypoints is less a tale of endurance than a form of meditation. In elegant, searingly honest prose, he treads the same line as John Muir, for whom “going out was really going in.’ David Farrier, author of Footprints

‘An epic journey and a book worthy of it. A thrilling and poignant meditation on the elusive reasons for getting out of bed in the morning; a dazzling kaleidoscope of colour, sensation, and time. An important new voice has arrived’ Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast