Leading Matters: How to enjoy and lead a walk in ten easy steps E-Book

Peter Davies

• Herausgeber: Grosvenor House Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 352

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Let's walk! But where? How? Who with? How far? A multi-day back-packing expedition or a stroll in the park? This book covers these questions, and will take you through ten basic steps to enjoying walking/hiking/tramping/rambling. Above all, the author provides the key to successful walking -leadership. Peter Davies has led walks in Britain, France, Austria, Spain, Switzerland and New Zealand. He gives practical advice - with stories from his twenty years' experience - on achieving the pleasures of walking and avoiding (mostly) the perils.

Leseprobe

also by Peter Davies:

Multicultural Literature in the Classroom

Alien Rites

The Uttoxeter Years: Kinder’s fight with the Dissenters

The Rise and Fall of Thomas Kinder

The Lion, the Kiwi and the Sacred Cow

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction:

Walkers, Hikers, Ramblers and Trampers

The First Step:

On deciding to go for a walk. Why do it?

The Second Step:

Where to walk?

The Third Step:

Who to walk with?

The Fourth Step:

How should I prepare?

The Fifth Step:

What should I take with me?

The Sixth Step:

What should I eat and drink?

The Seventh Step:

Where do I sleep?

The Eighth Step:

How do I find the way?

The Ninth Step:

How to lead a walk well

The Tenth Step:

How can walkers stay safe?

Notes

Books referred to

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following extracts:

From The Eastern Fells by A.W. Wainwright, © the estate of A. Wainwright. Reproduced by permission of Frances Lincoln, Ltd.

From the sound recording, D.J. Miller’s Swanndri® Story, 1997, Tai Awatea/Knowledge Net, produced by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. Reproduced by permission of D.J. Miller and Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand.

From Everest 1933 by Hugh Ruttledge and from The Everest Years by Chris Bonington. Reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd.

From A Walk to Jerusalem by Gerard Hughes. Reproduced by permission of Darton Longman Todd, Ltd.

Report in New Zealand Herald, 14th May 2012, ‘Police: Alpine shuttle driver irresponsible’. Reproduced by permission of New Zealand Herald.

Many kind people have helped with the initial planning, preparation and writing of this book. In particular I thank friends and members of the Salisbury Cathedral Strollers for planting the idea; Martin Ouvry and Sam Jordison for their critiques of early versions of the manuscript; George Marshall for his critique of a later version; Dave Brewer for researching some of the New Zealand material; Maryann Ewers and Bill Rooke of Bush and Beyond, Motueka, New Zealand, for updates on the Heaphy Track and advice on trail food; Victoria Leachman of the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum for help with some of the archive material; Jim Wood for his Italian anecdote; Nancy Coppock of Itchy Feet Travel Specialists, Bath, for advice on trail food; John Roseaman for the extract from his Camino de Santiago journal; and my wife, Deborah, for her love, encouragement and support. Any faults which remain are, of course, entirely my own.

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Cover design by John Oakey. Front cover photo by John Oakey, ‘Group of walkers on Crag Hill, English Lake District’. Back cover photo by Deborah Davies, ‘The author, Stewart Island/Rakiura, New Zealand’.

Introduction

My earliest memory of going for a walk (as distinct from merely walking)1 dates from the age of four or five. Most Sundays, my parents and I would leave home for the moors of Saddleworth, on the edge of the Peak District. We would walk along tracks, canal tow-paths, across meadows and through woods. At a suitably picturesque spot, we would stop to eat sandwiches and drink home-made lemonade, before catching the bus back into town. When I was nine or ten years old, my father would take me and a couple of friends for day-long walks. Usually we would walk in the hills to the south-east of Manchester, sometimes as far as Kinder Scout in the Peak District. As a child, I did not consider these excursions unusual or extraordinary. Nor did I ever think of myself as a ‘walker’. Like most of my friends, I walked to and from school, and most journeys of up to about two miles (three kilometres), to swimming baths, football matches and libraries, were taken on foot.

As an adult, I have continued to walk for pleasure. It is a habit I have maintained throughout my youth and, now I walk every day. For many decades, I have considered the best sort of holiday to be a ‘walking holiday’. I have taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by an increasing number of companies which provide opportunities to walk in different countries, accompanied by a leader, and with all the travel and accommodation arrangements done for you. For fifteen years, I have led walking holidays for two of these companies. I have walked extensively and led many groups of walkers in England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, and several countries of western Europe.

For most of this time, I have considered myself to be a part of a very large and increasing community of people who enjoy walking for pleasure, from a half-mile stroll in the park to a strenuous couple of weeks in the mountains. This feeling of being one of many has been reinforced by the evident growth in the number of walking clubs, societies and informal groups, as well as the surge in the membership of Ramblers in England and similar organizations in other countries. In this book, I refer several times to the Camino de Santiago, the long-distance walk - or some would say pilgrimage – with the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as its end-point. This major walk, like others world-wide, has increased in popularity on a huge scale. The number of people completing it has grown from about 2,000 in 1985 to more than 270,000 in 2010. At the same time, there has been an exponential growth in the number of books and periodicals aimed at the recreational walking market. Until recently, it seemed to me that the population as a whole – of other western countries as well as the United Kingdom – had discovered the simple pleasures of walking.

However, there are other, more disturbing, voices about the present state and the projected future of the practice of walking for recreation. One of these is that of the American writer, Rebecca Solnit. In her account of the history of walking, Wanderlust, Solnit suggests that recreational walking has already had its ‘golden age’ and came to an end in 1970. She chooses this date because then, for the first time in the history of any nation, the US Census showed that the majority of Americans were living in suburbs, and suburbia was an environment hostile to those who liked to walk.2 Solnit observes that, because of the way suburbs are designed, walking is just too difficult and often dangerous. US suburbanites walk only to cover the ground between automobiles and buildings. The effect on the nation’s health is plain to see, and Americans become ever more prone to obesity. Could it be that what Solnit observes applies only to the United States? Are other developed countries – especially those in Europe with their smaller cities, more pedestrianized urban spaces, and their stronger cultures of walking – quite different?

Not so, according to the English writer, Will Self. In his inaugural lecture3 as Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, Self suggests that present-day Londoners are alienated from the physical reality of the city, and the same applies to other city-dwellers. ‘Put bluntly,’ he says, ‘deprived of mechanical means of locomotion - the car, the bus, the train – and without the aid of technology, the majority of urbanites, who constitute the vast majority of Britons, neither know where they are, nor are capable of getting somewhere else under their own steam’. This state of affairs is, according to Self, in complete contrast with a previous age. ‘Little over a century ago, 90 per cent of Londoners’ journeys under six miles were still made on foot.’ Self predicts that a time will come – as early as the middle of this century - when walking ‘will have died out altogether’. He sees walking as ‘a democratizing force’ which seeks ‘freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control’. Without walking, we will have lost (perhaps we were already losing it) a sense of ‘connectedness to place’.

Writing at least half a century before Solnit and Self, the American novelist Ray Bradbury imagines a dystopia in which walking is not only very unusual but anti-social and potentially criminal. In his short story, The Pedestrian,4 Bradbury depicts a city, in 2053, in which roads have fallen into decay and people only leave their homes during the day. The main character, Leonard Mead, enjoys walking through the city at night, something no-one else does. On one of his usual walks, he encounters a robotic police-car. It is the only police unit in a city of three million, since the purpose of law-enforcement has disappeared with everyone watching TV at night. The police car fails to understand why Mead is walking for no reason and decides to take him to the Psychiatric Centre for Research on Regressive Tendencies. In an interview, Bradbury related an incident from his own experience which gave him the idea for this story. He was walking with a friend along a street in his home town in Illinois. A police car pulled up and the officer asked what they were doing. He was dissatisfied with their reply that they were just walking in an area where there were no pedestrians, and advised them not to walk again.

There is a huge amount of evidence to support the Bradbury-Solnit-Self hypothesis – that recreational walking has had its day and is now in decline. Surveys undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)5, the World Health Organization (WHO)6 and the British National Health Service (NHS)7 show not only that the populations of western countries have very high proportions of overweight and obese people compared to the rest of the world, but also that the trend is continuing. We are getting fatter. So, what’s really going on? Is walking the second most popular recreational activity in England (after coarse fishing) and more popular than ever in western countries? Or is it dying in the face of evermore difficult obstacles?

I think that both of these hypotheses may be true. It is possible that there are two distinct populations in each country researched by the WHO and the OECD: those (the majority) whose lifestyles involve less physical activity than those of previous generations; and a smaller group who take care over what they eat and take regular exercise, including recreational walking. If this is so, then my previous assumption – that most of us are getting healthier and more active – is wrong. Membership of walking clubs and groups may be growing at an impressive rate, but we are still a tiny minority of a population whose attitude to walking is – as far as possible – to avoid it.

Nevertheless, there is one piece of evidence from the UK which is worth a second look. In 2008, an organization known as the Travel Activity Consortium was awarded a grant of £20 million through the Big Lottery Fund’s Wellbeing Programme to create projects which enable inactive individuals to incorporate walking and cycling into their everyday lives in order to improve their health and wellbeing. The four-year project, which is supported by Ramblers and several local authorities, ran from 2008 to 2012. Named ‘Get Walking Keep Walking’ (GWKW), the project aims to increase regular independent walking amongst previously inactive and insufficiently active people. By doing this, it seeks to improve the health and wellbeing of those who have the most to gain from changing their behaviour. It has also challenged the perception that walking is something which only takes place in the open space in the countryside. Programmes have been established in four large cities – London, Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester. The project has worked in partnership with schools, Mental Health Rehabilitation Units, Primary Health Care Trusts as well as local authorities. Altogether, more than 90,000 people have been successfully engaged with the activities of the project. Unlike most initiatives of its kind, GWKW has been scientifically evaluated. In its final report, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) concluded that GWKW had ‘a significant impact on beneficiaries’.8

This report contains two findings which are significant for my purpose. They are: ‘that walking in a group, led by someone (my italics), helps with social interaction and stimulates a lasting interest in walking’; and ‘that walking has other social benefits in addition to improving one’s connectedness to place’. Experience of participation in the GWKW programme evidently shows that people may be persuaded that walking can be an enjoyable experience if it is undertaken in congenial company, and above all, if it is well led.

The ten steps which are the basis of the following chapters are, of course, about the quality of leadership – the single most important factor that can make the difference between a superb day (or several weeks) in wonderful scenery, and a disheartening and disorganized test of endurance and patience. But – I can almost hear readers shouting – what about the person who walks alone? The main benefit of solitary walking is that you are not dependent on the whims of a leader. I agree. In my third step, ‘Who to walk with’, I acknowledge the advantages of walking alone. However, my ten steps also apply to the solitary walkers. In effect, they become their own leaders.

Hikers, ramblers and trampers

Hiking, as distinct from mere ‘walking’, became a popular activity for both men and women in the early twentieth century. To ‘hike’ means to go for a long walk, or walking tour, especially in the country. In May 1931, the English newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, referred to ‘the widespread hiking movement in Germany and other continental countries. As early as 1809, the Methodist preacher Samuel Wesley, a prodigious walker, mentioned in a letter that he intended to ‘contrive one more pull at Surrey before I hyke over to Staffordshire.’

Rambling - or to go for a ramble as a rambler - has a longer history. It originally meant to walk (or to travel by other means) without a definite route or other aim than recreation or pleasure. In 1662, Samuel Pepys referred in his diary to the pleasures of a ‘ramble’ through Blackfriars on his way home. In 1711, Richard Steele, in the Spectator, wrote: ‘I went out of the house to ramble wherever my feet would carry me’. By the time the Forest Ramblers was established in 1884, to ‘ramble’ had acquired a more specific meaning: to walk on a definite route, frequently in the company of others, and this is the sense which has survived to the present day.

Tramping has, for centuries, had a negative connotation. In British English a tramp is usually understood to mean one who travels on foot, a vagrant or beggar. This is the sense in which Dickens intended when he referred, in Barnaby Rudge (1840), to ‘these people who go tramping about the country’. To tramp is to tread heavily or to trudge, or to go on a long and tiring or toilsome walk. In New Zealand, the word lost its negative association and came to mean ‘to walk for long distances in rough country’. In 1960, the New Zealand writer Barry Crump describes how he sometimes sent his men ‘to look for lost trampers up and down a branch of the stream’(A Good Keen Man (1960), p. 60). These are quite different from the groups of ‘gypsies and trampers on the road’ mentioned by Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop (1848). In 1966, a New Zealand periodical, The Weekly News, advertised ‘two-day tramps from the Milford Hotel up to the Sutherland Falls’ (3rd August, p. 7).

THEFIRSTSTEP

On deciding to go for a walk. Why do it?

The highest mountain in the world

On January 20th 1933, a party of seventeen Englishmen, under the leadership of Hugh Ruttledge, left Tilbury for Bombay en route for the Himalayas. This was the fourth British attempt to reach the summit of Everest since 1921, and Ruttledge was determined to learn from the experience of his predecessors. When Ruttledge’s men left Sikkim to enter Tibet, they took with them 90 ‘servants’ (including porters and guides) and over 300 baggage animals, carrying more than 1,500 boxes weighing 40 pounds each. On July 2nd, after three unsuccessful attempts to reach the summit, they set off on the return journey, defeated by weather and exhaustion. Twenty years later, the expedition led by John Hunt was successful, with Sherpa Tensing and Ed Hillary reaching the summit on May 29th 1953.9 Since then, Everest has been climbed with increasing frequency. Anyone with a large bank balance and a reasonable degree of fitness can attempt it. Every year, hundreds do it. On June 20th 2009, an astonishing 109 people successfully reached the summit.10

All these people – Ruttledge in 1933, Hunt in 1953, their predecessors in the 1920s, and their thousands of successors – decided that they would ‘go for a walk’. The fact that this walk is one of the most demanding in the world - and is very unlikely to be undertaken by any reader of this book11 - does not stop me from using the ascent of Everest as a reference point for my ten steps. Ruttledge’s account of the 1933 expedition12 exemplifies on a grand scale the choices which even the humblest walker needs to make. The first is the decision to set out in the first place. Why do it? George Mallory, who in 1924 may have been the first person to set foot on the summit of Everest before falling to his death, bemused the audience at one of his New York lectures in 1922 by suggesting that the reason for attempting Everest was ‘because it’s there’. A more likely reason for setting out on a walk for most of us is ‘because it’s enjoyable’. The mountaineer faces the same initial questions as the walker. Where should I walk? Who should I walk with? How should I prepare? What should I take with me? What should I eat and drink? Where do I sleep? How do I find the way? What makes a good leader? How can I stay safe? A second point of comparison is that walking, like mountaineering, is a collaborative rather than a competitive activity. There is no doubt that mountaineers can be seriously competitive individuals. But, after the first ascent in 1953, to reach the summit of Everest has been seen as a personal goal achieved through teamwork rather than by beating others. Moreover, we can all have our ‘Everests’ to aim at.

In the many years I lived in Shropshire, my personal Everest was the Wrekin. This is a big hill, or small mountain, near the market town of Wellington. At 407 metres (1335 feet) it is extremely modest in size. It is not even the highest point in Shropshire. But, measured by its height in relation to the circumference of its base, it is one of the highest mountains in the world, and, on this basis, certainly the highest in Britain. It is also one of the oldest mountains in the world; its pre-Cambrian volcanic rocks are about 680 million years old. Compared to the Wrekin, the Himalaya and the Andes are mere children. There is much history and legend associated with the Wrekin, including at least two stories of its origin [see the text box]. But its main attraction to me was its ease of access: only twenty minutes’ drive from my home. For several years I climbed to the summit of the Wrekin by various routes three or four times a week. I have known several people who have used the Wrekin as their regular local walk, as well as a training ground for more demanding excursions. Two of my walking friends trained for Kilimanjaro simply by walking up and down the Wrekin every day for two months.

The Wrekin has only comparatively recently become the focus for a recreational walk. From the Bronze Age until the first century AD the area around the summit was the headquarters of the Celtic Cornovii tribe. At the beginning of the English Civil War, King Charles I rallied his troops just outside Wellington, and the Wrekin was the site of a battle in which the royalists first won, and then later lost, control of the area. The portals to the hill fort on the summit are said to have been given the names Heaven Gate and Hell Gate following these skirmishes. After the coming of the railway to Wellington in 1848, the Wrekin became the destination for a very popular day’s outing for visitors from Wolverhampton and even Birmingham. Day-trippers could take a ride by pony and trap from the railway station to the Forest Glen tea room at the foot of the Wrekin, or the more energetic could do the forty-minute walk before tackling the ascent. The main car park (SJ639093)13 giving access to the Wrekin is close to the site of the Forest Glen Refreshment Pavilion, which, after a hundred years of providing tea and cakes for visitors, was relocated in the nineteen-seventies to Blists Hill Victorian Town at nearby Ironbridge. About a third of the way up is the misleadingly named Halfway House, now a private house but for many decades a refreshment stop with a small playground for children. The two ‘gates’ mentioned above give access to the outer circle of the hill fort (Hell Gate) and the inner circle, or the highest ground (Heaven Gate). The summit itself is marked by a trigonometrical point and orientation table. Just to the north-east of these you can detect traces of Stone Age hut circles. These are more easily seen in winter when there is less vegetation. Beyond and slightly below the summit are two geological features with associated stories. The Raven’s Bowl, also known as the Cuckoo’s Cup, a slight depression on top of a rocky formation, is said never to dry out even in the hottest summer. A few metres further to the south-west, there is a cleft in the rock known as the Needle’s Eye. Like many such ‘Eyes’ it can be ‘threaded’ by a person with moderate agility. Young women, it is said, would thread the needle in order to find out who - or whether - they would marry. According to one version of this legend, the girl would marry the first man to be seen after threading the needle. If she looked back as she threaded the needle, she wouldn’t marry at all!

The walk from the Forest Glen car park to the summit is just over a mile (nearly two kilometres) with 876 feet (267 metres) of ascent. The Wrekin provides a pleasant walk lasting anything from an hour and a half (straight up and down) to half a day. In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, visitors who had come by train would make a day of it, stopping at the Forest Glen for lunch or tea and allowing time for the walk back to Wellington train station. Nowadays, most visits are shorter and dependent on the use of a car.

Wrekin (1): The Two Giants

Two exiled giants piled up earth to build a new home. The excavation left a massive trench which filled with water, forming the River Severn. When the hill was finished, they argued over who should live there. As one giant raised his spade to hit his rival, a raven flew down and pecked his eyes so he missed. He let go of the spade which came down and split the rock, thus forming the feature known as the Needle’s Eye. The raven’s attack had caused the giant to spill a huge tear, which burned into the rock forming another feature, now known as the Raven’s Bowl or the Cuckoo’s Cup.

Wrekin (2): The Giant and the Cobbler

A giant called Gwendol Wrekin ap Shenkin ap Mynyddmawr had a grudge against the town of Shrewsbury. He decided to flood the town and drown its inhabitants. He collected a giant spadeful of earth and set off towards the town. As he approached Wellington he met a cobbler returning from Shrewsbury with a sackful of shoes for repair. The giant asked him for directions and told the cobbler that he intended to dump the earth into the Severn and flood the town of Shrewsbury. ‘It’s a very long way to Shrewsbury,’ said the cobbler. ‘Look at all these shoes I’ve worn out walking back from there!’ The giant immediately abandoned his plan and dumped the earth in a heap at his feet, which became the Wrekin. Then he scraped the mud off his boots, thus forming the nearby Ercall Hill.

[In one variant, the devil is substituted for the giant; but the giant version is the older legend.]

Workers, Pilgrims and Writers

When did people start ‘going for a walk’ or, more adventurously, ‘going on a walking holiday’? In one sense, the question is absurd. People have always walked, and not just to carry out utilitarian tasks. Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, gives an account of the way in which the Aboriginal tribes of Australia perform their religious duty of travelling the land, singing the Ancestors’ songs and bringing the world into being afresh.14 As Chatwin points out, native Australians in the 1980s were continuing a tradition of walking which was thirty thousand years old. Perhaps walking has always been associated with religion or the spiritual life. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one of fiction’s great tourists. In The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, she has joined a party of twenty-nine assorted men and women who are setting out from a Southwark pub to pay homage to St Thomas à Becket, whose shrine is in Canterbury Cathedral. Archbishop Thomas was martyred in 1170, killed in the sanctuary of the cathedral by four knights. King Henry II was obliged by public indignation to acknowledge his own responsibility for Thomas’s assassination and to do public penance at Canterbury. Soon after, the shrine became a major centre of pilgrimage until its destruction by King Henry VIII in 1538. The fifty-two miles (eighty-three kilometres) from Southwark to Canterbury must have seemed an easy stroll compared with other pilgrimage journeys Chaucer’s Wife of Bath claims to have made. As the narrator of The Prologue comments, ‘She knew a great deal about wandering by the way’; she had visited most of Europe’s Christian pilgrimage sites including Boulogne, Cologne, Rome, Galicia, and had travelled three times to Rome.15

At the time of the composition of the Canterbury Tales, the end of the fourteenth century, the number of people taking part in pilgrimages had declined, possibly because this was the century in which a large proportion of the population in Europe had been carried off by bubonic plague. Nevertheless, to undertake a journey on foot or horseback to a holy place was still regarded as an important devotional act. Pilgrimages to Rome and Jersusalem were particularly challenging for Christians in northern Europe and at times of war were practically impossible. The pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela offered an easier alternative, and, for English travellers, could be shortened. The Wife of Bath, seemingly a wealthy woman, might have taken this easy option: a sea journey from Winchester to La Coruña followed by a walk of thirty-five miles to Santiago. The Camino de Santiago, the ‘Way of St James’, originated in the belief, unsubstantiated by the Bible but nevertheless strong, that the body of the apostle Saint James was taken by boat from Jerusalem and buried a few kilometres inland from the port of Padrón. The ‘body’ was discovered in 813. Alfonso II, king of Asturias, came to pay his respects, had a chapel built, and the site became a centre of pilgrimage. At the height of its popularity, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the city was receiving over half a million pilgrims each year. Apart from the interruptions of war and the steep decline of numbers from northern Europe after the Reformation, pilgrimage to Santiago has continued ever since, and has increased dramatically since international travel became easier and cheaper in the second half of the twentieth century.

For most pilgrims, to visit a saint’s shrine was simply a matter of faith. Those who undertook the journey to Santiago de Compostela believed in the miraculous power of Saint James and were told that the journey would guarantee them a remission of half their time in purgatory. On arrival, they were given a credencial, an ecclesiastical proof that they had actually got there. It is scarcely credible that anyone in the pre-modern period should have undertaken such a difficult and dangerous journey without being certain that Saint James’s body was in the tomb now beneath the high altar in the cathedral. However, this is not to exclude other reasons for pilgrimage: for some it was fashionable, and for others it provided opportunities for romance, marriage and crime. Then, as now, it was an adventure as well as a spiritual experience.

The recent growth in popularity of the Camino de Santiago is an example of the increased popularity of walking. In 1935 the Ramblers’ Association of England had 1,200 members. In 2010 the ‘Ramblers’ (as it had become) had 140,000 members and more than 800 affiliated local organizations. Because of its casual and spontaneous nature, it is difficult to quantify the popularity of walking as a leisure-time activity. It requires no special equipment or previous training. A walker need not apply for a licence or join a club or team. This is why estimates of rates of participation can be only approximate, compared with, say football (in England about seven million men and boys and one million women and girls) or angling (about fourteen million). All we can say is that walking for enjoyment, for whatever distance and whether alone or with others, is becoming more popular, at least for some sections of the population of the UK.

‘One impulse from a vernal wood’

But now I must return to the question ‘why walk?’ Walking as something other than a means of getting from A to B for a particular purpose seems to have become common amongst the leisured classes of England and Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. A few people in France and Switzerland had begun to climb mountains. Dr M.G. Paccard and Jacques Balmat made the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786. They were ahead of their time. The Golden Age of mountaineering did not get under way until the 1850s. ‘Summit bagging’ is outside the scope of this book, though I shall have much to say about walking in mountains. Walking as such, without a primary purpose of arriving at a destination or achieving religious virtue, was undertaken in earnest by the Romantic poets, in particular by Wordsworth, Coleridge and their friends. They may not have been the first recreational walkers, but they were the first to become famous as a group. Coleridge’s collaboration with Wordsworth began in 1795: they walked in Somerset; then, after Coleridge and Robert Southey had moved to Keswick and the Wordsworths had settled in Grasmere, they walked extensively in the Lake District. Wordsworth was the champion walker of this literary group. According to his sister Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals, he walked daily, often more than twenty miles, and it was not uncommon for him to spend an entire day walking. Wordsworth was also a pioneer of the walking holiday, or ‘tour’. In 1790 he set out with a friend, Robert Jones, to walk across France to Switzerland and Italy. This was no ‘Grand Tour’ in the style of aristocratic young men of an earlier generation. In fact, only one year after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, it was more of a hazardous adventure than a walking holiday. Before he met Wordsworth, Coleridge had already done a walking tour in Wales with his friend Joseph Hucks and then another tour in Somerset with Robert Southey. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth enjoyed walking alone as well as in each other’s company. Coleridge has the distinction of achieving the first recorded ascent of England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike. Although he was not such an avid or dedicated walker as Wordsworth, it was Coleridge who achieved the posthumous honour of having a walking route named after him: the Coleridge Way, from Nether Stowey to Porlock.

But, you may be thinking, these poets were not just walking for pleasure in the sense that we know it, but walking for a purpose: to seek inspiration or subject matter for their poetry. To them, you might say, it was a form of work. In the case of Coleridge, there is little obvious connection between his walking and his writing. For Wordsworth, however, walking was crucial to everything else he did. Throughout his huge output and long career, Wordsworth repeatedly asserts his belief in the transformational and restorative power of nature. The ‘impulse from a vernal wood’ which he values far more than ‘meddling intellect’ may, he goes on in the short poem The Tables Turned, ‘teach you more of Man/ Of moral evil and of good/ Than all the sages can’.16 While walking he picked up material for his poems, whether these were experiences of waterfalls, flowers or rainstorms, or of people such as a leach gatherer, an abandoned child or a Cumberland beggar. Moreover, there seemed to be no demarcation between his walking and his writing. Dorothy notes that he would compose or revise his verse in his head while out walking. ‘He generally composes his verses out of doors and while he is so engaged he seldom knows how the time slips by or whether it is rain or fair.’ A servant at the Wordsworths’ grand house, Rydal Mount, once told a visitor who asked to see the great man’s study: ‘This is his library; his study is out of doors.’17 His friend Thomas de Quincey reckoned Wordsworth walked over 175,000 English miles during his lifetime.

For the next champion walker-writer, we need to move on to the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Dickens was an avid and compulsive walker. By his own account, he was ‘always on the road’. As Wordsworth had done before him, he saw walking as part of his work:

Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent Garden, London – now about the city streets: now about the country by-roads – seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.18

The material which Dickens gathered as a ‘traveller’ for the great house of Human Interest Brothers can be seen in his novels, especially those such as Oliver Twist and Bleak House which show an extremely detailed knowledge of London. When visiting Paris, he wanders ‘into Hospitals, Prisons, Dead-houses, Operas, Theatres, Concert-rooms, Burial-grounds, Palaces and Wine Shops. In my unoccupied fortnight of each month, every description of gaudy and ghastly sight has been passing before me in rapid Panorama’.19 But, from the evidence of friends and from his own writings, it seems that for Dickens walking was a compulsive activity, not just a way of gathering information for his novels. He regularly walked at least twenty miles a day, and sometimes all through the night. He would often walk from his London lodging to his house in Gad’s Hill, Kent, a distance of thirty miles (forty-eight kilometres). According to a friend, he walked ‘one mile every quarter of an hour, measured by the milestones.’ The compulsion to walk never left him, even when he was suffering from lumbago or from sheer exhaustion caused by his self-imposed, punishing regime of public readings. On the evening of 8th June 1870, he suddenly announced to his guests at Gad’s Hill that he had to go to London. He stood up, as if to depart immediately. This was his last act. He suffered a stroke and died the following day.

Could we say that Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dickens were walking for recreation? In a broad sense, yes, we could. However, I doubt whether the walking undertaken by any of these three could be described as an activity undertaken purely for pleasure. Coleridge and Wordsworth were searching for the sublime, just as a previous generation of writers had looked for the ‘picturesque’. Like them, Dickens was gathering material. But walking served another purpose for Dickens. It seems that he found the process of writing extremely stressful and needed to walk to relieve the tension. ‘If I could not walk far and fast,’ he once wrote, ‘I think I should just explode and perish’. To some extent, Dickens, like some modern ramblers, hikers or back-packers, walked for the sake of his health – at least, his mental health. In Chapter XIII of his autobiographical The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens describes his night walks, undertaken as a drastic cure for insomnia. ‘For a series of several nights’ he walks relentlessly, encountering drunks, potmen, police, watchmen, and the toll-keeper on Waterloo Bridge. His curiosity takes him to empty theatres, Newgate prison, Billingsgate and Covent Garden market, Westminster Abbey and the Bethlehem Hospital. His primary purpose is to self-administer a ‘brisk treatment’ for his inability to sleep.

In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night of the year.20

It is these ‘people’, the citizens of London who, for one reason or another, are awake and abroad when most residents are asleep, who provide the raw material for his novels. As the clock of St Martin’s church strikes three, he trips over a beggar sleeping on the church steps. As Covent Garden market slowly comes to life, he watches the children fighting for the offal and ‘dart[ing] at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on’.

Dickens, therefore, turns out to be a walker with a purpose no less utilitarian than Wordsworth or Coleridge. Like them, he sees walking as essentially linked to his occupation as a writer. But, as this chapter from The Uncommercial Traveller shows, there is also a strong motive of self-preservation. By his own account, he needs to walk to avoid exploding or perishing; he needs to tire himself out in order to be able to sleep. It seems that for Dickens, walking, while providing experience which was extremely useful to him as a writer, was primarily undertaken for the sake of his health. But he overdid it. He felt compelled to walk even when exhausted from his extremely dramatic readings from his novels, and it is likely that this compulsive walking contributed to his death at the age of fifty-eight.

Tranquil restoration

In 1824, the same year that Dickens started work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve, the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths in the Vicinity of York was formed. This was followed two years later by the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths. In 1865 the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society was established, originally with the purpose of protecting public spaces around London. In 1879, one of the earliest known rambling clubs, the Sunday Tramps, was set up. Other similar organisations were the Forest Ramblers (1884), the Polytechnic Rambling Club (1885) and the Peak and Northern Counties Footpath Preservation Society (1894). In 1893 The Co-operative Holidays Association (known as the CHA) was formed by the Revd T.A. Leonard, a Congregational minister from Lancaster. In 1913 Leonard resigned from the CHA and set up the Holiday Fellowship. In 1905, the Federation of Rambling Clubs, consisting of representatives from several English groups, was created with the aim of maintaining and preserving ramblers’ rights and privileges on a national scale.

William Wordsworth was the precursor and possibly the principal source of this gradual increase in agitation for access to the countryside throughout the nineteenth century. In his early poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798), he values the ‘tranquil restoration’ which he experiences while walking in the beautiful Wye Valley. His Guide to the Lake District was published in 1810, apparently with the intention of assisting others to partake in the supreme enjoyment of natural beauty. But, as he grew older, Wordsworth became alarmed by the prospect of large numbers of people swarming across his beloved Lakeland. In October 1844, the year after he had been made Poet Laureate, he published a sonnet in the Morning Post, as part of his campaign to prevent the construction of a railway line from Kendal to Windermere, which, he feared, would bring hordes of day-trippers from the industrial cities of the north of England. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

As the population gradually moved from country to town and city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they took the habit of country walking into the urban areas with them. The appalling living conditions in the closely packed industrial towns, the grinding poverty and long hours of tedium stimulated a strong desire to seek rest and recreation by walking into the countryside. At the same time, access to footpaths and common land was being restricted by landowners, mainly aristocratic at this period, who wanted to preserve their territory for their own leisure pursuits, mainly the rearing and killing of game. In the late eighteenth century, poaching was punishable by death, and later by transportation to the colonies. The closure of footpaths, the continuing practice of enclosure of common land and the employment of gamekeepers and other protectors of territory, severely limited access to the countryside just as the desire to get out into the fresh air was increasing.

The history of recreational walking in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tells the story of increasing animosity between those who wanted access to the countryside and those who wanted to prevent them from ‘trespassing’ on ‘private’ (as they saw it) land. In September 1931 at a meeting at Longshaw in the Peak District, a resolution was passed with the intention of forming a National Council of Ramblers’ Federations, and four years later the Ramblers’ Association was established, for the first time giving ramblers a national voice.