Jersey Wetherspoon, New York, Monday 16th March 2026
Review of Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours
There are travel books that catalogue places, and there are those rarer works that explore the geography of the mind. Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey belongs firmly to the latter tradition. It is a book that wanders across landscapes, languages, histories, and memories, with the reflective restlessness that has characterised the finest travel writing for more than two centuries.
From the opening pages, Martyn de Tours situates the reader not merely in a location but in an atmosphere: a mist-laden, half-imagined territory where Wales, Galicia, memory, and myth converge. The book begins with an invocation of place that feels less like orientation than enchantment. Bandoxa itself becomes a symbolic landscape, a mental territory as much as a geographical one, where rivers murmur stories and time moves in looping spirals rather than straight lines.
In this sense, the book sits comfortably within the lineage of travel literature shaped by writers who understood that journeying is rarely about distance alone. As the great Victorian traveller Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” De Tours takes that maxim seriously. His narrative does not rush toward conclusions; it lingers in digressions, anecdotes, and recollections, allowing the reader to wander alongside him through decades of experience.
A Celtic Sensibility
What distinguishes Bandoxa most strikingly is its deeply Celtic sensibility. The Welsh imagination, melancholic, lyrical, and occasionally mischievous, permeates the text. Valleys echo with memory, viaducts become mythic structures, and robins carry messages from the departed.
De Tours writes of childhood in Caerphilly, of the vanished Walnut Tree Viaduct, of grandparents who seem to belong as much to folklore as to biography. The effect is reminiscent of the poetic geography found in the work of Jan Morris, who once observed that Wales is “a land of memory where past and present converse without embarrassment.”
Yet the author’s vision stretches beyond Wales. Galicia, Madrid, Mallorca, and the cities of Europe appear throughout the book like stations on an intellectual pilgrimage. These places are not merely destinations; they are chapters in a life shaped by curiosity, music, politics, language, and the restless search for meaning.
Travel as Memory
Travel writing has always been closely allied with memoir, but in Bandoxa the two forms fuse completely. The author moves freely between past and present, between childhood recollection and philosophical reflection.
This fluid treatment of time evokes the tradition of reflective travel literature pioneered by writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose own journeys across Europe blended scholarship, humour, and personal history. Leigh Fermor famously remarked that “travel is a part of education,” and de Tours’ narrative offers precisely that: a lifelong education conducted across landscapes both literal and intellectual.
School projects about Welsh rebellion, environmental catastrophe, and Soviet history become turning points in the author’s intellectual development. A conversation about religion unfolds between a rabbi, a priest, and an imam. A memory of a band rehearsal turns into a meditation on the roads not taken. These digressions might appear eccentric in another writer’s hands; here, they feel integral to the spirit of wandering inquiry that defines the book.
A Conversation with the Great Travellers
The most pleasurable travel books often feel like conversations with earlier travellers, and Bandoxa participates enthusiastically in that tradition. One hears faint echoes of Bruce Chatwin, whose belief that “the journey, not the arrival, matters” shaped modern travel writing.
Like Chatwin, de Tours is fascinated by the stories embedded in landscapes: abandoned bars in rural Galicia, long-demolished Welsh viaducts, forgotten libraries, and railway stations of memory. Each becomes a narrative doorway into history or philosophy.
At times, the book also recalls the humane curiosity of Freya Stark, who insisted that travel should enlarge sympathy rather than merely accumulate experiences. De Tours shares this instinct. His reflections on politics, religion, and culture are often impassioned, yet they remain grounded in an underlying faith in dialogue and humanity.
Humour and the Art of Digression
For all its lyricism, Bandoxa is not solemn. The author’s wit, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharply satirical, runs throughout the book.
There are comic passages about tsundoku (the art of buying books faster than one reads them), affectionate recollections of obscure rock bands, and surreal imagined interviews with rabbis and musicians. These moments of humour prevent the book from drifting too far into nostalgia; they keep it lively, unpredictable, and deeply human.
The structure reflects this spirit of digression. Chapters vary wildly in tone and length, from lyrical reveries to theatrical dialogues. The result resembles what the author himself calls a “memory salad”: an assortment of stories and reflections tossed together with deliberate disorder.
The Geography of a Life
Ultimately, Bandoxa is less about where the author travels than about how a life is shaped by places. Wales provides the emotional foundation; Spain offers sunlight and distance; Europe supplies the broader stage upon which history and politics unfold.
The book reminds us that travel writing, at its best, is not merely descriptive but reflective. As Paul Theroux once observed, “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” De Tours writes precisely from that retrospective vantage point, revisiting the landscapes that formed him and finding new meanings in their shadows.
A Book of Wandering
What lingers after the final page is not a neat narrative but a mood: reflective, wandering, tinged with Celtic melancholy yet warmed by humour and affection.
Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey may resist easy categorisation; it is memoir, travelogue, philosophical notebook, and cultural meditation all at once, but that resistance is part of its charm. Like the landscapes it describes, the book invites the reader not simply to observe but to linger, to listen, and perhaps to wander a little further than expected.
In an era of hurried travel and algorithmic itineraries, Martyn de Tours offers something rarer: the slow journey of a mind moving through memory, history, and place.
And as every great traveller knows, those are often the journeys that last the longest.
THE END
