William Blacker: An enchanted life

“My parents haven’t yet realised,” William Blacker confessed to a friend many years ago, “but I have absolutely no intention of ever getting a proper job.”

Time passed and Blacker stuck to his resolution. He might occasionally be tracked down in the British Library, studying some obscure point of Middle European history; but the next day he would be off to Tuscany, where he was, apparently, restoring a medieval tower; and then he’d be off to Transylvania.

There was no doubt that Blacker was a free spirit, and a charming one too. But as for where all this was leading, no-one knew. Some smiled indulgently; others shook their heads; his father wrung his hands. Then, in July of last year, the mystery was solved when his name appeared on the cover of a book which took London’s literary establishment by storm.

Along the Enchanted Way is an account of the years Blacker spent in northern Romania, living a life that had hardly changed since the Middle Ages. “A wild and captivating story” … “an intoxicating memoir” … “impossibly romantic” … “I can’t get it out of my mind” ... “it moved me to tears” – such is the critical acclaim for a work that was over a decade in the making, and which is at the same time a celebration of, and a lament for, a passing world.

But with almost excessive reticence, Blacker reveals little about himself and his achievements. What, then, is the story behind the well-connected Chelsea resident who has sprung this remarkable book on us?

We are sitting in front of a log fire in the large drawing room of his family’s draughty early nineteenth-century house in Yorkshire where Blacker goes to write undisturbed. On the wall facing me is a charming painting by the society portraitist Neville Lytton of Blacker’s mother and her brother, now Lord Rathcavan, as children; and among the various framed photographs on a nearby table is one of the Prince of Wales, signed “Charles, 2004”. Blacker, six foot two with slightly raffish good looks, is wearing aged cords, an old jumper with a scarf to keep out the cold, and a pair of well-worn suede shoes. The valley beyond the sash windows is covered in a deep layer of snow that muffles all sounds.

Grandson of the Colonel Stewart Blacker who in 1933 was the first man to fly over Mount Everest, and descendent of the O’Neill high kings of Ireland, William Blacker was born in July 1962. He was brought up with his two brothers on the Goodwood estate in a house of rare beauty built by the 3^rd Duke of Richmond in 1776 for Lady Sarah Lennox and set in idyllic parkland that has hardly been touched since then.

There followed five happy years at Eton, where Blacker devoted much of his energy to devising ingenious ways to torment the master who had the misfortune to preside over the most anarchic house in the school. Later, at Exeter University, and while in theory reading philosophy, he regularly risked life and limb in a series of hair-raising stunts for the Dangerous Sports Club. One episode saw him jumping off a volcano on a hang-glider 14,000 feet up in the Andes. “It was pretty much my first flight,” he says, “and I landed in a tree on the edge of a ravine.”

After that, he rented a room in Florence and learned Italian. “I felt I needed to re-educate myself.” Back in London, he worked briefly for an antique dealer (“Not my thing at all; I wanted to create things, not just sell them.”), after which he started on a three-year furniture-making course at Rycotewood outside Oxford. But still there was no career in sight.

Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that neither Blacker nor his two brothers have followed ordinary career paths. Having worked as a chef in London, his older brother Barnaby opened the first delicatessen in Cork, getting up at five in the morning to bake the bread; and with his own hands he also built a fantastical house like an oversized witch’s hut in the Irish countryside. His younger brother Rohan is an entrepreneur who founded Deliverance, London’s first luxury take-away restaurant, and then Sofa.com.

It is tempting to speculate that after a childhood of perfect freedom in one of the most perfect houses in England, the constraints of a routine office job held little appeal for these colourful Old Etonians. And might their Celtic blood have something to do with it, too?

The turning point for Blacker came in January 1990. Acting on an impulse immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he headed east from Berlin, and driving on over the snow-clad Carpathian Mountains he came down into the almost medieval world of the Maramures region in northern Romania. “It was extraordinary to find a country so frozen in time,” he says. “I had no idea that such a place existed, and knew immediately that this was where I wanted to be.”

Meanwhile, he had to complete his woodworking course, and there were also negotiations to be carried out in Italy, where he had his eye on a ruined tower in the Etruscan hilltop village of Sorano. Then, in 1993, came a cruel blow. Hit by the Lloyds crash, his parents had to sell the family home. “It was my retreat from the modern world,” says Blacker. And he no longer had it.

Finally, in May 1996, he returned to the Maramures. Here he was adopted by an aged couple and led a traditional peasant life, working in the fields. “It was exactly like living in a novel by Thomas Hardy,” he says. “It was the most fascinating thing I had ever done. Physically it was very tough, but the sense of companionship was marvellous. I’ve never seen a more obviously contented people in my life. You could see it in their eyes and in the way they laughed.”

One year turned into four; after which he had an affair with a gypsy girl, fell in love with her sister, who bore him a son, and moved east to live a wild and sometimes dangerous life with his new family in a romantic village near the town of Sighisoara.

It is difficult not to conclude that this was where Blacker’s life had been leading for years – the natural destination of one man’s aesthetic odyssey; and there have inevitably been comparisons with the youthful travels of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Indeed, in a now rare appearance in print, this grand old man of English letters has described Blacker’s book as being close to his heart.

What Blacker is far too modest to say, however, is that it is largely thanks to his campaigning that the outside world knows of the existence of and also the threat to one of the most extraordinary architectural phenomena of European civilisation – the 200-odd Saxon villages of Transylvania with their fortified churches that have not been touched since they were built between the 14^th and 16^th centuries.

To walk round these places, as I did not long ago, is to go back in time to a land straight out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Ducks and geese waddle down mud streets flanked by identical traditional farmhouses, while the walls and battlements of the ancient fortified churches offer a refuge from maurauders, and all around the untouched countryside stretches as far as the eye can see.

Founded by the Saxons whom King Geza II of Hungary invited here in 1143 to defend his southern borders, these villages now face destruction and desecration as their inhabitants return to the Germany of their ancestors after almost 900 years.

Not only did a pamphlet that Blacker wrote in 1996 on this threat result in funding from the Packard Humanities Trust, but it also came to the attention of Prince Charles, and before long he was showing the heir to the throne around the beautiful but dilapidated houses of his remote Transylvanian village.

He also took the Prince to an old-fashioned peasant wedding, where just for once not a single person recognised him. “We had great fun,” says Blacker. “More importantly, the Prince has made a huge difference to the preservation of the traditional architecture and countryside of Romania.”

Now, almost overnight, Blacker has become something of a literary celebrity and an important voice on all things Romanian. An article on gypsies in The Times; a talk on German radio on the damage being done to Romania’s built heritage by the flood of easy money washing in from the EU; an appearance at the Royal Geographical Society this month [March] – there are numerous demands on his time.

Based mainly in Chelsea and Yorkshire, he still returns to Romania to see his young son, on whom he dotes, or disappears to Italy to add the finishing touches to his medieval tower in Tuscany. He has also set up his own conservation charity, the Anglo-Romanian Trust for Traditional Architecture (www.artta.org.uk). And constantly present is the memory of the tough but profoundly satisfying Hardyesque life in the Maramures that led to all this. “I have deep nostalgia for those days,” he says. “They were heavenly, magical.”

A charmed existence, it might seem; and one which, as John Julius Norwich has pointed out, makes him the only possible heir to the mantle of Patrick Leigh Fermor. But underneath it all one also detects something else – the same will of steel as his magnificently moustachioed grandfather who first flew over Mount Everest.

William Blacker: An enchanted life

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