Based on a map belonging to Lawrence now in the Bodleian Library.

In the summer of 1908 he set off on a long cycle tour of France to see more medieval castles and make plans, drawings and photographs for the thesis. He would experience no difficulty with the language, and during earlier cycling holidays he had worked out the minimum requirement of spare clothing he needed to carry. His father provided sufficient money to pay for lodging at modest country hotels.

The route was carefully planned in advance with the help of Murray's Handbook for France and works on medieval French architecture such as Villet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire Raisonné Lawrence crossed to Le Havre in mid-July, and cycled via Chateau Gaillard and Gisors to Coucy. There he turned south, covering the 500 miles to Avignon in ten days - a considerable achievement given the state of French country roads at the time. Shortly afterwards he caught his first glimpse of the Mediterranean, and wrote home lyrically, ‘I felt that at last I had reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete . . . Oh I must get down here, - farther out - again!’¹ Later he suffered from bouts of Malaria, which he thought he had contracted on this journey while sleeping out on the Rhone Delta.