Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War.
Down in the Valley is truly evocative of time and place. A beautiful illustration of how, in some way, we are all indelibly influenced by the landscape of our childhood. -- Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path Age is taking Lee's eyesight but polishing up the anecdotes and deepening his characteristic note of wistfulness for a lost age ... It is a fine thing to revisit this writer's landscape and hear his amiable voice in it again. -- Michael Caines * Times Literary Supplement *