A Ramble Through the History of Walking E-Book

Bill Laws

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 262

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'This book confirms the splendid eccentricity of the British, which often involves oddly dressed men opting to walk long distances for no apparent reason.' – BBC Countryfile magazine 'Laws' sprightly, often arch, account of Britain's hiking heroes is a pleasure to read.' – Walk magazine 'The great affair is to move: to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. This book celebrates the history of walking for leisure and pleasure. There's no shortage of the famous, and the not-so-famous, exponents of a good, long walk: Dr Jonson and his faithful Boswell on their Hebridean jaunt; John Taylor, whose Penniless Pilgrimage – a record of his 1618 journey from London to Edinburgh – provided the first account of a walking tour; and Samuel Coleridge who conceived his epic tale of the Ancient Mariner on a ramble through Devon. Celebrating the history of walking for leisure and pleasure, Bill Laws tells the stories behind key walking inventions such as the rucksack, bloomers, youth hostels and the long-distance route. Fully illustrated throughout, A Ramble Through the History of Walking is sure to delight anyone interested in the engaging history of one of man's favourite pastimes.

Leseprobe

BYWAYS, BOOTS & BLISTERS

BYWAYS, BOOTS & BLISTERS

A HISTORY OF WALKERS & WALKING

BILL LAWS

First published 2008

This edition published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Bill Laws, 2008, 2009, 2011

The right of Bill Laws, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7552 3

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7551 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘THE GREAT AFFAIR IS TO MOVE’

CHAPTER 1 – FIRST FOOTERS

Thomas Coryate

Mr Bos, drover

Ben Jonson

William Lithgow

Foster Powell

Footnote: Walking Boots

Captain Robert Barclay

Alfred Watkins

CHAPTER 2 – DEVOTED WALKERS

John Bunyan

Footnote: What Walkers Wear

Pastor Moritz

Rev’ds Bingley, Williams and Warner

Francis Kilvert

Canon Cooper

CHAPTER 3 – POETS IN MOTION

‘Three persons and one soul’

Samuel Coleridge

William Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth

William Hazlitt

Thomas De Quincey

Edward Thomas

Footnote: The Rucksack

CHAPTER 4 – BRINGING IT TO BOOK

John Taylor

William Hutton

Ellen Weeton

Footnote: Bloomers

George Borrow

Robert Louis Stevenson

Hilaire Belloc

William Hudson

CHAPTER 5 – A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Leslie Stephen

Benny Rothman

Footnote: The Devil’s Rope

Tom Stephenson

Stephen Graham

Herbert Gatliff

CHAPTER 6 – ROUTE-MASTERS AND RECORD BREAKERS

Hugh Munro and William Poucher

‘A. Walker’

Frank Noble

Footnote: The Stile

Trailblazers

Record breakers

FURTHER READING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Walking is both a solitary and a companionable exercise. I have no-one to thank but the hills and wild weather for the former. However I owe a debt of gratitude to my walking mates: Jerry, Jon, Michelle, Mike, Leslie, and Stef for the germ of an idea; to Roger Calow for our sojourns in Wales and the Outer Hebrides; to Nic Millington and Archie for our Offa’s Dyke journey; and my fellow footpath wardens, Hugh Bryant and Wendy Harvey. My thanks to my family, Abby, Sarah, Kahlia and Rosie, are tempered by an apology for all those short cuts that did not work out.

I am grateful too to Bobbie Blackwell of Herefordshire Lore, Rebe Beck and Wendy Smith from the Offa’s Dyke Centre, John Burland, the Estate of A. Wainwright and Pauline Brocklehurst from Animal Rescue, Cumbria at the Wainwright Shelter, Karl and Keith Bushby, Len Clark, Terry Court, Derby City Council, the Edward Thomas Fellowship, Robin Field, Dan French and staff at the Ramblers’ Association, Filey Museum, Elizabeth Gatliff, Elaine Goddard, Roger Hinchcliffe, Eve Huskins, Joe Hillaby, Andy Johnson of Logaston Press, members of the Kilvert Society, Elspeth Loades, Lizzie Lane of BBC Hereford and Worcester, Eve Lichfield, Jaqueline Mitchell, June Noble, Jean O’Donnell, David Petts, John Poucher, Barry Ray, Ann Soutter and the George Borrow Society, Peter Elkington from Rydal House and Gardens, Ali Kuosku and Silva Sweden AB, Glen Storhaug, Gavan Tredoux (www.galton.org), Wigan Heritage Services, the Youth Hostels Association (England and Wales) and especially their patient archivist Trevor Key, staff at the British Library, Bristol City Library and Herefordshire Libraries especially Robin Hill, volunteers at the Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust especially John Humphries and Frank Martin, The Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames, and my agent, Chelsey Fox of Fox and Howard.

‘THE GREAT AFFAIR IS TO MOVE’

Between our first faltering steps as a toddler and the time when age or infirmity finally axe our legs from under us, walking is our liberation. ‘The great affair’, declared Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘is to move.’

Some people walk because it’s good for them. It gets those endomorphins going. Ignoring Hilaire Belloc’s insistence (An Anthology for Walkers) that ‘the detestable habit of walking for exercise warps the soul’ they step out on the gym treadmill, the approving words of George Macaulay Trevelyan ringing in their ears. ‘I have two doctors,’ he wrote in Clio, A Muse and other Essays Literary and Pedestrian (1913). ‘My left leg and my right.’

Some, like the estimated 18 million Britons who regularly enjoy a summer’s day stroll, walk for the pure pleasure of it, often in company, occasionally in solitude. George Borrow and the sociable socialist Benny Rothman (one of his strolls on Kinder Scout cost him three months in prison) were gregarious and walked to meet people. The great Alfred Wainwright walked to escape them.

Some of our pedestrian heroes walked further than most. In the nineteenth century Captain Barclay was reputed to have walked over 130 miles in twenty-four hours, while William Wordsworth was said (by Thomas De Quincey who walked his own fair share of English miles) to have walked almost 18,000 miles by the age of sixty-five. And while Birmingham’s William Hutton, who trotted up to Hadrian’s Wall and back, a distance of 600 miles, in his seventy-eighth year, celebrated his ninetieth birthday with a ten mile stroll, Thomas Coryate and William Lithgow walked themselves to death.

There are those who walked shorter distances, yet still enjoyed themselves. The farther you go the less you know, maintained Lao Tsu in Tao Te Ching. The Rev’d Francis Kilvert, one of a congregation of clerics who scaled the Welsh hills, was never happier than when he was ‘villaging about’ visiting his flock and watching out for pretty parishioners. William Hudson, meanwhile, was content to be, as he called himself, a traveller in little things.

Many had a particular reason for taking a hike. Foster Powell walked for money, Samuel Coleridge for literary inspiration, Ben Jonson, despite his size, for literary posterity and Richard Long for his art. London’s Stephen Graham walked to see where the compass would take him, while Frank Noble and Tom Stephenson walked to blaze new trails, Offa’s Dyke and the Pennine Way respectively.

It follows that, like the Inuit with his arsenal of words for snow and the Celt with more than a few names for rain, the English speaker should have inherited a rich lexicon of walking words. We stroll and wander. We saunter and meander. We amble and ramble. We hike and we tramp. Footsore finally, we trudge and plod home to bed. (Or to our computers – sharing the slog on a blog is a growing phenomenon and walkers’ websites ring with anxieties: ‘What type of food do I need on the Coast to Coast?’ ‘How can I prepare for 60 miles of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path on my sixtieth birthday?’)

Young walkers fret about fitness levels; older walkers worry about staying the course. But with so many pedestrians covering so many miles there is no shortage of sensible advice from what to carry (whiskey for wet feet, advised Canon Cooper; an umbrella to avoid being mistaken for a robber, suggested George Borrow; a collar and tie in case you need to visit the bank, advised Graham) to training for the journey (walk twenty miles a day with plenty of purging sweats, counseled the nineteenth-century Walter Thom; carry an overweight rucksack around with you, recommended John Hillaby. On the journey itself the relief of carrying a lighter pack would put a spring in your step).

Finally the act of walking can be a therapy in itself. While William Wordsworth found his poetic muse from wandering, many others have found solace and a solution by following the old Latin proverb solvitur ambulando. Sort it out through walking.

CHAPTER 1

FIRST FOOTERS

THOMAS CORYATE

‘He went most on foot’

In the late summer of 1617 a small crowd gathered at the market cross in Odcombe, Somerset. They had come to hear the departing speech of local hero Thomas Coryate. The son of the village’s late rector, Coryate was a dapper-looking Elizabethan with a generous head of swept-back hair, a trim beard and, if his portrait by William Hole is anything to go by, the look of a man curious about life. He satisfied that curiosity by walking. ‘Of all the pleasures in the world travel is (in my opinion) the sweetest and most delightfull,’ he once declared. He was small and lean, no doubt a consequence of constantly travelling ‘mounted on a horse with ten toes’ as his contemporary Bishop Fuller described him.

Eccentric Englishmen seem to have taken to walking long distances for pleasure long before other nationals. Thomas Coryate who wished to ‘animate the learned to travel into outlandish regions’ was one of the first on record. Revealing his travel plans to his fellow villagers that morning in 1617 Coryate declared himself bound for India by way of Greece, Palestine and Persia. On foot. He then presented his old walking shoes to the village church (hung in the porch they would attract curious visitors for decades after his death) and set out on the Yeovil road to Portsmouth with a last look back at friendly Odcombe. He would never return.

Nine years before on 14 May 1608, the then thirty-two-year-old had departed from Dover on his first major journey. ‘There hath itched a very burning desire in me to survey and contemplate some of the chiefest parts of this goodly fabric of the world,’ he explained. His father had died the year before, the proceeds of the will, possibly helping to fund his journey. He started his 1,975 mile circumnavigation of forty-five European cities first on the Dover ferry and then on horseback, but he completed the return journey on foot.

Coryate spent five months travelling and, at its conclusion, rushed home to record his recollections. The book took three years to write and proved, at first, impossible to publish. The interminable and long-winded title may have been partly to blame:

Coryate’s Crudities Hastily gobbled up in Five Moneths travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of High Journey and the Netherlands; Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdome.

The contents, however, were revealing for Coryate, or the Odcombian legge-stretcher as he called himself, not only providing precise details of distances, places and peoples, but also such a store of entertaining anecdote that the book, when it did go to print, became a seventeenth-century sensation.

Coryate’s Crudities provided the reader with more than a mere hors d’ouevres of the walker’s world. He described being half drowned in a stream of horse urine (having inadvertently bedded down in the animal’s straw) and enduring terrible sea sickness on the Channel crossing, (the graphic on the cover of Crudities depicted an Elizabethan lady throwing up on his head). He fled a group of Venetians who were intent, he was convinced, on forcibly circumcising him. Later he must resist the charms of a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana: ‘As for thine eyes, shut them and turn them aside from these venerous Venetian objects,’ he tells himself.

But this clergyman’s son also proved to be a sensible journeymen, a traveller with an observant eye and an open mind. When he notes the Italians using a ‘little forke’ with which to eat their meat (rather than risk contamination from unclean hands) he adopts the fork himself and is credited by some for introducing it into England. Walking and talking he hears Latin spoken in the more relaxed European mode and modifies his own pronunciation accordingly.

On his return he faced up to the writer’s perennial problem: finding a publisher. Thomas Coryate was well educated and well connected. In his twenties having left Gloucester Hall, Oxford without a degree but with a good command of the classics, he played the happy fool at court with Prince Henry for he was ‘always Tongue-Master of the company’ according to Ben Jonson, while Bishop Fuller declared that ‘sweatmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments’. It was to friends like these, and influential acquaintances such as John Donne, Thomas Campion, the poet Drayton and the architect Inigo Jones, that Coryate now turned for help with his book. He extracted testimonials, mostly written in mocking verse and in a range of languages including Irish and Welsh, from more than sixty of them. These were published later as a book of ‘panegyrick verses’ in their own right, the Odcombian Banquet.

The reading public, small and select as it was, tucked into Coryate’s Crudities with relish, so much so that Coryate rushed out a second book, Coryate’s Crambe, or his Colewort twice sodden which added to his celebrity status as a walker.

But fame, even in the seventeenth century, brought with it its brickbats. John Taylor, who wrote the first account of a walking tour in Britain regularly mocked the ‘Odcombian Deambulator, Perambulator, Ambler, Trotter’ and the verbal feud continued between the two walkers with Taylor still hurling insults after Coryate had made his final journey, and ended up, as one friend put it, lodging in the final ‘Field of Bones’.

When he left Odcombe in 1617, Coryate made his way through Greece, Palestine and Persia. By the autumn he had reached Mandu in central India and joined the first official English embassy ‘a bedraggled little band ... dancing attendance on the Murghal Emperor Jahangir’, according to Charles Nicholl writing in the London Review of Books. The group included the ambassador, Sir Thomas Rose (an acquaintance from Coryate’s days at Prince Henry’s court) and the embassy chaplain, Edward Terry, whose quarters Coryate shared for a while. Travelling on foot and living frugally, Coryate expected to manage on a penny a day, but he was, by now, running short of funds. Employing his natural talents as a linguist, he composed a letter in wordperfect Persian, begging for alms and sent it to the Murghal emperor. Rose, the English Ambassador, was furious at this humiliating breach of etiquette from an embassy guest. The emperor, however, was amused and sent Coryate 100 rupees. It was sufficient to finance what would be Coryate’s final walk that November.

The embassy chaplain, Edward Terry, had described in his A Voyage to East India (1655) how Coryate had fallen into a swoon after having walked the 2,700 miles from Jerusalem to Ajmer covering inhospitable terrain at the rate of 70 miles a week. Now, wrote Terry, he walked out of the embassy ‘like a ship that hath too much sail and too little ballast’. Nevertheless Coryate, exhausted and suffering from dysentery, managed to reach Surat on the Gujurati coast. Meeting a group of fellow countrymen, Coryate called for aid and alcohol. They plied him with sack, a sherry-like dry wine. The wise walker knows that drinking alcohol after a long tramp, which has depleted their sugar levels, can result in dizziness or fainting. In Coryate’s case it killed him.

‘It increased his flux which he then had upon him. And this caused him within a few days, after his very tedious and troublesome travels (for he went most on foot) at this place to come to his journey’s end,’ wrote Rev’d Terry. ‘Sic exit Coryatus, and so must all after him [to] ... the Field of Bones, wherein our Traveller hath now taken up his lodging.’

MR BOS, DROVER

‘There is not a public house between here and Worcester at which I am not known’

Coryate was unusual in that, as one of the ‘panegyrick verses’ celebrating his achievements put it,

either without scrippe or bagge

He used his ten toes for a nagge.

Gentlemen of Coryate’s class were expected to travel on horseback or by carriage, not least for their own safety.

His pedestrianism marked him out as an eccentric. Not that there was anything wrong with eccentricity according to the Victorian traveller Mabel Sharman Crawford. Eccentricity was ‘in truth, the mainspring of our national progress’ and an ‘element of character eminently productive, on the whole, of good,’ she wrote in one of her travel books, Through Algeria.

However for most people in Coryate’s and Crawford’s time walking was a necessity and not a pleasure. Working men and women walked miles because there was no alternative. Some of the hardiest walkers were to be found among the drovers of western and northern Britain, tough individuals paid to deliver meat on the hoof to the city folk who ate it. This trade in livestock, which had been recorded in Britain by the Romans, saw men drive cattle, sheep, pigs, turkeys and geese from the highlands, where the animals had been raised, to the lowlands where they were rested, fattened and butchered. The drovers’ tracks followed the lonely lines of the hills, skirting expensive toll roads and resting at the motorway service station of the day, the drovers’ inn. A stand of trees at a remote farmhouse would signpost some overnight grazing while half-remembered names in the English countryside, Welsh lane or Scotch walk, celebrated the passage of the drovers and their beasts as they walked their way to market at an average speed of two miles an hour, their collies and corgis yapping at their heels.

Having delivered their animals, the drovers returned home carrying hard cash and gossip from abroad, and bolstering their reputation for being rough, tough and rugged individuals. In reality many made respectable names for themselves. Richard Moore-Colyer in his Roads and Trackways of Wales mentions men such as Edward Morus of Perthi Llwydion, who regularly walked his cattle the 300 miles or so from North Wales to the county of Essex, and who was also a respected seventeenth-century poet. Another, Dafydd Jones of Caeo, was a noted Nonconformist hymn writer in the eighteenth century. They were not all men of the pen and the chapel: in 1850 one Welsh drover strapped a man who owed him money, to the neck of an unbroken colt at Barnet Fair in Hertfordshire. The debt was apparently repaid when the colt had travelled less than five miles.

The modern drover, the person responsible for moving livestock from pen to pen within the market, still walks for a living, but the long distance drovers have died out. Although, as Moore-Colyer points out, ‘many of the Lewises, Evanses and Williamses currently enjoying a good living as graziers in the Shires owe their prosperity to drover ancestors’, the obituary writers of the provincial press rarely remembered the humble drover.

However one not especially endearing drover gave a brief account of himself when he shared a drink with an observant writer, himself a walker, in 1854 in North Wales. Mr Bos, a pig drover in his forties, bumped into Mr George Borrow at an Anglesey inn. He had a broad red face, grey eyes, a wide mouth and a strong set of teeth – Borrow, writing in Wild Wales might almost have been describing a prize horse. He was dressed in a pepper-and-salt coat ‘of the Newmarket cut’, corduroy breeches and brown top boots. He wore the broad, black, low-crowned hat typical of the drover and carried a heavy whale-bone whip with a brass head.

The discourse between Borrow and Bos, a simple man who might have comfortably featured in a Victorian comic novel, sheds a little light on the life of the drover. Bos claimed to have been through every town in England, maintained that ‘there is not a public house between here and Worcester at which I am not known’, and declared a marked preference for Northampton, not because of the men who were ‘all shoemakers, and of course quarrelsome and contradictory’, but for the women who were even more ‘free and easy’ than those of Wrexham. Bos assumed that Borrow was a pig jobber or pig drover and was curious to know how much a stone Borrow received for his live pork when he visited Llanfair. Borrow refutes the suggestion.

‘Who but a pig-jobber could have business at Llanfair?’ wonders the drover. In fact, he wonders, why should anyone having any business in the whole of Anglesey, save that the business be pigs or cattle? Borrow fires Bos up, telling him that one Ellis Wynn ‘gives the drovers a very bad character, and puts them in Hell for their malpractices’. Mr Bos is again confused. He had last met Wynn, a man who could neither read nor write, at Corwen. He now determines to ‘crack his head for saying so’ the next time they meet. The mix-up between Wynn the Corwen pig jobber and Borrow’s Wynn (a respectable clergyman) is left unresolved and the author abandons the conversation to eat his supper.

Many professional drovers like Mr Bos were reaching the end of their useful working lives in the 1850s, the railways depriving them of their trade. Another drover tells Borrow that he has stopped droving: ‘Oh yes, given him up a long time, ever since domm’d railroad came into fashion.’

Yet some working men still walked their sheep along the drovers’ trails up until, and shortly after, the Second World War. One, well known in the markets of South Wales and the borders, was a sheep dealer called Mac Higgins. The story goes that on one of his last journeys he spent a week driving a hundred and fifty ewes from Carmarthen to the Wednesday sheep market at Hereford. He reached the market in time for the sale, but the sheep failed to sell. Eventually Mac’s father arrived and, hearing the news, went into one of the many market pubs to try and effect a sale. Finally, at half past eight at night, Mac’s father emerged from the pub with good news and bad: he had clinched a deal. But the buyer was from Swansea – four days droving back down the road to Carmarthen.

BEN JONSON

‘A foot pilgrimage to Scotland’

In 1599 a former friend of William Shakespeare, Will Kemp, Morris-danced the 127 miles from London’s Royal Exchange to Chaplefield in Norwich. With rest days and delays (snow blocked his way at Bury St Edmunds) the journey, celebrated in Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder, took a month. (In 2000 a Morris team danced a day off Kemp’s record). Kemp’s eccentric venture was the probable inspiration for Thomas Coryate’s own pedestrian journeys, which, in turn, inspired England’s greatest dramatist of the time, Ben Jonson: two years after Coryate’s death Jonson took the unlikely step, several in fact, of walking from London to Scotland.

Jonson had known and admired Coryate. He had edited the ‘panegyrick verses’ for Coryate’s Odcombian Banquet and hailed the writer as ‘a great and bold carpenter of words’. Jonson, who for a century after his death was judged the better playwright when compared to Shakespeare, planned to write a book about his walk. He even had a working title, ‘A Discovery’. But in 1632 fire destroyed his library and the unpublished manuscript went up in smoke. What the manuscript might have revealed was how Jonson managed his ‘foot pilgrimage’ when, by his own admission, he was ‘twenty stones less two pounds’ (125 kg).

In June 1619 the forty-five-year-old Jonson stepped out of his London home and, supported by a stout walking stick, headed for Hatfield and Bedford, but with Edinburgh, 400 miles away, as his destination. Apart from the domestic detail that he bought a new pair of shoes in Darlington, little else is known of his journey.

When he reached Edinburgh he was given a civic reception. He stayed in the city for over a year collecting material for the intended book and lodging with a number of acquaintances including a poet, William Drummond of Hawthorn. It was Drummond who reported later that, notwithstanding Jonson’s own advice in Volpone that ‘calumnies are best answered with silence’, the dramatist was suspicious of the motives of a fellow walker. This was John Taylor who had also walked from London to Edinburgh. While Jonson had followed the eastern route through Newcastle, Taylor had trudged along the western route by Carlisle. And his reputation had preceded him. Taylor’s motives for starting the war of words with poor Coryate ‘the Odcombian Deambulator’ were to fuel publicity for his own efforts. Now, thought Jonson, Taylor intended to discredit his own pedestrian efforts. According to Drummond, Jonson was convinced that Taylor was ‘sent along to scorn him’.

When Taylor reached the Scottish capital Jonson arranged to meet his walking adversary. In the end Jonson seems to have enjoyed Taylor’s company, even presenting the walker with two guineas to drink to the dramatist’s health when the poet returned to London. Jonson himself eventually returned to London to work on the ill-fated ‘A Discovery’. This time, however, he carried himself and his ‘monstrous belly’ home on the coach.

WILLIAM LITHGOW

‘I bequeathed ... my feet to the hard bruising way’

Coryate’s and Jonson’s walks were quiet affairs in comparison to those of William Lithgow, a Scotsman who claimed to have walked 36,000 miles in nineteen years. ‘During his travels he never mounted a horse, or put his foot into a carriage, or any description of vehicle whatever,’ wrote one commentator. However, what Lithgow described as his ‘pedestriall pilgrimages’ brought him pleasure and pain, and highlighted the dangers facing the footsore, solo walker in the seventeenth century.

Born in Lanark around 1583, Lithgow started his wanderings from necessity rather than choice. Embroiled in an unwise love affair, he was attacked by members of his lover’s family who cut off his ears. Lithgow fled the country before they amputated anything else. Having started travelling, he found it impossible to stop.

In 1614 Lithgow walked through the ‘Orcadian and Zetlaudian Isles’ (Orkney and Shetland) and then on through the Low Countries, Germany and France. He gave a full, although possibly exaggerated, account of the pedestriall pilgrimages in The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Ninteen Years Travayles, published in 1632. During these peregrinations he was ‘by seas suffering thrice shipwracke, by Land, in Woods and on Mountaynes often invaded; by ravenous Beasts, crawling and venemous Wormes daily incombred; by home-bred Robbers and remote Savages; five times stripd to the skin.’ All this before his disastrous encounter with the Spanish authorities, when he was crippled after being tortured both by the civil administrators for being a spy and by the Inquisition for being a heretic.

In Rare and Painful Peregrinations he described the pleasures of coffee drinking, the first person in England to do so; he tells of a pigeon post operating out of Aleppo to Baghdad and of a native obsession with the dried grape, or currant, in that land. He observed how the women of Cairo ‘piss standing although the men cower low on their knees doing the same’. In Crete he tells of a certain herb which gilds the teeth of those who eat it. When he heard the story that a dog, thrown into the Grotto di Cane in Italy, would die in the sulphurous water, and yet recover when thrown into a nearby lake, he tried to persuade a passing dog owner to test the theory. Sensibly the owner refused. Lithgow then immersed himself in the Grotto waters and emerged unscathed. Impressed, the dog owner threw in his pet. It drowned and, despite frantic efforts, was not revived by the waters of the lake.

Whether he was being attacked by robbers, sought by slave traders or defrauded by inn keepers, Lithgow was the constant victim. When he landed in Constantinople, the Turkish captain of his ship bade him goodbye with a cry of ‘Adios Christiano’. It prompted ‘four French renegades to fell desperately upon me, blaspheming the name of Jesus and throwing me on the ground, beat me most cruelly.’

Occasionally he was saved from assault by his tobacco pouch, since ‘the Turks take as kindly as though it had been a pound of gold, for they are excessively addicted to smoke as Dutchman are to the pot.’ But the nicotine rush is not enough to save him when, walking in Moldavia, he is ‘beset with six murderers.’ Having robbed him of everything they leave him tied naked to a tree. ‘I was left here in a trembling fear for wolves and wild boar till the morrow; where at last I was relieved by a company of herdsmen.’

In Venice he was forced to suspend his perambulations when he was pursued by a gang of felons. After hiding for several nights in the roof of the Earl of Tyrone’s residence, he managed to scale the city walls and escape. He walked on through Italy, across the Alps and through the former Yugoslavia to reach the Mediterranean Isles and Greece. As a compensation for all his hardships he was presented with a timely gift of fifty ‘gold zechins’, enough to allow him to continue his ‘sumptuous peregrinations.’

Lithgow walked on, crossing Greece and travelling down through the Middle East into Jerusalem where he joins company with three Dutch men. Apparently they had been drinking too much ‘strong Cyprus wine without mixture of water’ and, one by one, they fall terminally ill. Each on his death bed generously bequeathed him their personal fortunes making our hero richer by some 942 gold zechins and rings and ‘tablets’. Lithgow finally returned to England after walking through Cairo, Alexandria, Malta, Italy and France. He brought home with him ‘certain rare gifts and notable relicks’ from Jordan and Jerusalem which, diplomatically, he presented to King James, the Queen and Prince Charles.

Lithgow was to profit from dead men’s money a second time during his next ramble, this time through Europe to North Africa and back via Eastern Europe. At one point he stumbled upon two noblemen lying dead in a field, the victims of a duel. He helps himself to their money. ‘It was mine that was last theirs; and to save the thing that was not lost, I travelled that day thirty miles further to Terra Nova,’ he recorded cheerfully.

It was thanks to experiences like these William Lithgow became a celebrity walker, regularly invited, in exchange for a traveller’s tale or two, to dine with nobility. He was a welcome face at the English court and, as a consequence, Lithgow travelled under royal patronage on his next walk. Carrying letters of recommendation from King James he headed off on a hike to Ethiopia by way of Ireland and Spain. But the King’s protection failed him when, in Spain, he was arrested as a spy and tortured, first by the civil authorities and then by the Inquisition. He was released only when news of his incarceration reached the English consul. The Scotsman, his injuries so severe that he could no longer walk, was sent back to England and, in 1621, in a bizarre spectacle, exhibited to the King and his court, laid out on a feather bed. Lithgow was dispatched to Bath spa for a cure, the King paying for his treatment, but the pedestrian’s tribulations were not over yet.

King James arranged a meeting of reconciliation between Lithgow and the Spanish ambassador. However, when the two came face to face Lithgow could not contain his anger and he assaulted the ambassador. Dragged off by the palace guards, Lithgow was thrown into prison at Marshalsea for the attack.

After several fruitless attempts to secure compensation from the Spanish ambassador, Lithgow went wandering again. He failed in his attempt to walk to Russia, the severe weather defeating him. Little is known of his later years and he is thought to have died at the age of sixty-three after returning to live in his native Lanark in 1645. But, as one commentator recorded, his reputation lived on: