NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF TRAVEL WRITING

In The Unremembered Places, published this month (Birlinn), Patrick Baker explores far-flung ruins and relics – from a cemetery for dam-builders to the remains of illicit stills – that serve as archives for Scotland’s “wild histories”. It’s a haunting little book ( just over 200 pages).

Also recently published: Walks on the Wild Side by John Pakenham (Eye Books), who recalls treks in the desert of East Africa in the 1980s with local tribesmen, when technology meant map and compass and many villagers had never seen a white man; and Where Was I Again? (through Amazon: tinyurl. com/ydhkb2an), a new edition of collected pieces by Geoff Hill, a travel writer who can be lyrical but whose strongest instinct is to go for a laugh.

Head to the Laos of the 1950s (left) with Norman Lewis, in an extract from his book

A Dragon Apparent read by the BBC presenter Petroc Trelawny. It’s one of a series devised to encourage donations to the Hands Up Foundation, a charity working in Syria and Lebanon (tinyurl.com/ yab7klde).

Need a breath of sea air? Try the quirky Edge of England (edgeofengland. com) podcast, for which

Emily Jeffery and Cole Morton explore the coastline around Beachy Head, Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters.

In a fond and funny piece for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane, who took to the rails just before the global lockdown, celebrates the enduring romance of the sleeper (tinyurl.com/yddyebft).

Eighty years on from the birth of Bruce Chatwin, author of In Patagonia, writers who knew him contributed to a podcast released on the website Travel Writing World (tinyurl.com/y999gxc9).

From The Telegraph archive: Jenny Diski (tinyurl.com/ycymppvc), on a cargo ship, discovers that you can’t quite leave everything behind.