We organise and lead the kind of holidays we enjoy ourselves – which means travelling in the company of like-minded people who share our love of art, history and literature and our sense of adventure and fun.

Specialists in historical and literary journeys and in art and cultural history tours, particularly to central and eastern Europe and in Britain.

We delight in introducing the richness and diversity of often neglected regions where, sometimes against all odds, strong artistic and intellectual traditions remain.

Who we are

Lucy Abel Smith

Founder and Director of Reality & Beyond Ltd

My passion for the art and architecture of Central and Eastern Europe was fired as a student at London University where I specialised in late medieval art. I first visited Prague in 1972 when few tourists ventured behind the Iron Curtain and wrote the first post-communist guidebook to the city (Prague after the Velvet Revolution, John Murray, 1991).
I became interested in the wider culture and history of Czechoslovakia, including its country houses, and in the equally rich artistic heritage of its neighbours – especially Hungary, Romania, Silesia and the Balkan states. I first began to lead tours to the region in the 1980s.
In the early 1990s, I became a pioneer into Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo and began to spend part of every year in Transylvania.
This deep knowledge and love of the region led me to save from dereliction an 18th-century Saxon house in Transylvania.
For several years I worked for a leading specialist travel company, ending up as chairman and have been a consultant and guest lecturer on a broad range of subjects spanning art, architecture, decorative arts and landscape and garden history for Sotheby’s, the Art Fund, the British Museum Society, the Friends of the Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as Smith College Alumni and Venetian Heritage.
In 1992 I founded the biennial Fresh Air sculpture show in the grounds of my home in Gloucestershire and in 2013, the first ever Transylvanian Book Festival in Romania.

Bronwen Riley

Creative Director Transylvanian Book Festival; Romania; Hadrian's Wall; Lake District Literary Tours

It was the Romans that first piqued my interest in Romania, when I learned at school that Romanian – rather mysteriously – was a Latin language. That sense of curiosity and mystery about Romania has never left me. After a first degree in Classics at Oxford I took an MA in Byzantine art at the Courtauld Institute as a direct result of my interest in the post Byzantine art of Romania. I wrote my dissertation on a miracle-working icon in Oltenia and organised and led my first tour of Romania in 2001. After the Courtauld, I worked in publishing and then at English Heritage, where I was head of content and series editor of guidebooks. Here I spent my time visiting and researching historic properties and sites all over England and publishing 80+ Red Guides.
I presently work as a consultant and editor, developing and publishing books on historic houses. I am currently researching my latest book ‘Journey to Jerusalem’ which follows a group of pilgrims on their way from the Western Provinces to the Holy Land in the late C4th as well as collaborating on a book on Westmorland farmhouses.
I live in the Lake District and am a trustee of the Lakeland Arts Trust and of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society.
Publications include: Transylvania (Frances Lincoln, 2008); Journey to Britannia (2015); English Heritage Guide to Great Yarmouth Row Houses and Greyfriars Cloisters.

Slow travel, small groups

We like to have time to wonder and to wander around the sites we visit; to eat delicious local food in beautiful settings, to enjoy picnics with memorable views, to meet writers, artists, craftspeople, conservationists – anyone willing to share their knowledge and enthusiasm and who can help us reach a greater understanding and appreciation of the spirit of a place.

Private visits

Our extraordinary contacts and our preference for travel with small groups means that we can visit places not usually open to the public or accessible to large groups: from palaces to peasants’ cottages, from tiny artisan workshops to famous artists’ studios and the homes of writers, intellectuals and private collectors.

Expert tour leaders

Our tour leaders all have specialist backgrounds in art and architectural history and decades of experience in their fields of interest – and in preparing wonderful tours. We also invite specialist guest lecturers on our tours.

Experienced, knowledgeable guides

We only book local guides we know and trust with excellent contacts, enthusiasm, friendliness and organisation skills.

Tailor-made Tours

Whether it’s a tour for yourself, a small group of friends or family or for a society or special interest group, we can design trips especially around your interests and enthusiasms. With our superb contacts book, we can create a range of visits for specialists and connoisseurs to private palaces, houses and collections throughout Britain, Continental Europe and the USA. If you have any special places you would like to see, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Lucy Abel Smith founded Reality and Beyond Ltd in 2000, building on decades of experience leading independent travellers all over the world for art organisations and museum groups.

In the early 90s she was asked to run exploratory tours in Albania and then in countries re-emerging from the break- up of Yugoslavia. She applied the same sort of formula of visits to private houses for tours and meals and using small hotels and restaurants as in the UK, where this market is well developed. But in the post-communist world, this was difficult and unknown, so she brought potential guides, musicians and artists to stay in Britain, to give them an idea of what travellers expected in the West.

There is a danger, as in the case of so much of Europe that migration to towns and abroad leaves villages empty with the risk that they become full of second homes or purely tourist magnets. Most inquisitive tourists like to meet locals and be surrounded by local life. Yet with agriculture at a low ebb tourism is frequently the only source of employment. But without tourism people are ignorant of what they have and pull it down.

These magnificent villages look much the same as they have for 100s of years but they with fall down if not lived in like all buildings of brick and lime and tile. So tourism can save culture, at least physically. Efforts are being made by various charities MET, ADEPT and others to create jobs within the villages.