What is it about the British? We do love to head off into the blue – and I don’t mean snorkelling in the Aegean or sunning it up big-time in the Algarve. I’m talking Scott of the Antarctic, Dr Livingstone – and that more quixotic breed of Brit who wanders off alone, often without even bothering to give a half-decent excuse. Robert Byron, Wilfred Thesiger, Norman Lewis, Colin Thubron . . . Even if we don’t ourselves indulge, we savour the tales of others who do.

It really is just the British. Go and look at the travel section of your local bookshop, and on your summer hols compare those bountifully laden shelves with their sorry foreign equivalent – whether in Germany, France, Iceland, or the US. And it’s no good saying, “Well, actually the nation’s favourite travel author is Bill Bryson and he isn’t a Brit.” Nor is Paul Theroux, but he, just like Bryson, soon learnt as a writer resident here the strange needs of our little island race and exactly how to service them.

So, from where comes this troublesome urge? I found myself asking the same question a few years ago, when I lost my dog team in the Bering Strait pack ice. My frostbite was playing up, the sweat on my face freezing into a mask and my prospects altogether looking grim. How on earth, I wondered, could I ever have wanted to be here in the Arctic?

My chance to find the answer came while making a television series on our great travel-writing tradition (Traveller’s Century) I focused on those who were, I felt, the three defining characters of the genre.

First, the man described by Jan Morris as our greatest living travel writer. The young and wayward Patrick Leigh Fermor side-stepped a proposed career in the Army and, having steeped himself in the classics, in 1933 set out on foot across Europe to Constantinople. Sleeping in a haystack one night, a castle the next, Fermor read from his copy of Hamlet (in German, naturally) as he walked along. Those who encountered him found someone almost implausibly charming and debonair; he was, it is said, a cross between Graham Greene and James Bond.

If Fermor represents the archetypal Byronic figure, the errant scholar who combines action and intellect – A Time of Gifts(1977), and Between the Woods and The Water (1986) cascade with ornate, mercurial prose – his exact contemporary, the poet Laurie Lee, is for me the wandering minstrel. Familiar to us from Cider With Rosie, his memoir of a childhood immersed in quintessentially English countryside, he also wrote As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), the tale of his escape from that very same world.

Lee set off down the lane with his backpack and violin – and, with only occasional interludes, kept walking until he reached the south coast of Spain. The impression you get is of a beguiling stranger who appears in the dusty villages along the way as if from nowhere, entrancing the inhabitants with his music, and then moving on like the pied piper.

Finally we come to Eric Newby, whose books are the tales of the ordinary bloke who hastily packs his suitcase and heads out for the sheer hell of it. Faced with a dreary future in 1930s London, at 17 Newby enlisted on the Moshulu, the largest sailing ship still carrying grain from Australia. Other adventures followed, notably A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) in which he pottered off into remotest Afghanistan to climb an unconquered 20,000ft peak – after a weekend practising in Snowdonia with the help of a waitress.

As I retraced the trek myself, it seemed to me that A Short Walk has endured because it celebrates not just a journey but the simple human impulse to find adventure. It also shows the British as we’d like to be. Here is the bulldog spirit – the plucky Brit who becomes a hero not because he’s prepared, but because he isn’t.

So, what do these three wandering misfits say about us? For one thing, that foreign travel isn’t, after all, just an indulgence of the privileged. While making the TV series I recognised in myself that very first impulse that led Fermor, Lee and Newby to spread their wings. These faraway lands offer each of us the chance to escape our safe, constrained and overcrowded homeland to better define ourselves on our own terms.

Traveller’s Century, Thur, BBC4, 9pm

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