The Land Beyond

Leon McCarron is a writer, broadcaster and adventurer from Northern Ireland. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Abraham Path Initiative, and an Explorer ambassador for The North Face. He was a recipient of the 2017 Neville Shulman Award and in the last decade has travelled over 35,000 miles by human-power.

Leon has walked a 1000-mile loop of the Holy Land, crossed 3000 miles of China from north to south on foot, and led human-powered projects in Kosovo, Armenia and on the Yemeni island of Socotra. He has cycled from New York to Hong Kong, walked through the largest sand desert on earth, kayaked the longest river in Iran, and ridden across Patagonia on horseback. In 2019 he led an effort to design a long-distance hiking trail in central China, and he is currently working
on a similar endeavour in Iraqi Kurdistan.

He has presented a one-hour documentary for the BBC on the legacy of the explorer Lord Dufferin and reported for Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent from the West Bank, Iraq, and Socotra. He has also made a four-part series Walking Home From Mongolia for National Geographic, presented an episode of the Real Stories strand about the Israelite Samaritans and produced four independent feature films, including the Banff Film Festival Finalist Into The Empty Quarter. He has bylines for National Geographic, New Scientist, BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph, amongst others. Leon is the also author of The Road Headed West: A Cycling Adventure Through North America.