A 1,000-mile trek through the Caucasus finally clears the mind

It takes a brave writer, even in an age transfixed by the workings of our inner woo, to bare their soul on the page. Tom Parfitt, a former Moscow correspondent, was scarred by the horrifying Beslan school siege and massacre which he saw unfold in North Ossetia in 2004. For years he was haunted by a recurring dream of ‘endless purgatory’ in which a grief-stricken woman, who has just learnt that her child has been killed in the terrorist attack, falls through the air, groaning like a wounded animal.

An outdoors type who enjoyed a bucolic childhood on a Norfolk farm, Parfitt yearns to free himself from the hack’s daily shackles. He comes to believe a long walk will be an essential act of healing and understanding. Not just any old long walk, but a 1,000-mile traverse of the Caucasus, west to east, through a patchwork of small, turbulent republics on Russia’s southern fringe, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. For many, probably most, readers, these mountain-garlanded statelets of Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan will be terra incognita.

Off he goes from Sukhum – a latter-day Paddy Leigh Fermor with a prose style I suspect the doyen of travel writers would have admired. There are scrapes and scares – and how could there not be? Wolves, bears and dogs are regular worries during the first few weeks. It is 2008, and tensions are running high. The Russo-Georgian war unhelpfully breaks out, pitting Georgia against South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Tramping through the mountains, Parfitt is accused of being a spy and is briefly detained a couple of times.

He does a nice line in humour. Modest, self-deprecating and highly attuned to his surroundings, he is not afraid to mock his own very British reactions.