Is there a history of walking?

It’s a question that wouldn’t have been asked, let alone answered, before Rebecca Solnit’s pioneering book Wanderlust, published in 2000.  Solnit is a writer probably best known for her books on women – she was the first to formulate the idea of ‘mansplaining’ – but her range of reference is startlingly wide, and her work as a writer is matched by her record as an activist in her home patch, California.  Her most recent book is about George Orwell, and she shares something of Orwell’s mix of historical curiosity and political urgency.

Wanderlust, and its shorter sequel A field guide to getting lost (2005) opened my eyes to two aspects of walking.  First, it’s an activity, usually taken for granted or dismissed as uninteresting, that carries with it a complex weave of meanings and motivations, and connections with all kinds of fields.  In Solnit’s words, walking ‘wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.’  And second, it does have a history.  The nature of walking has changed quite dramatically, especially since the end of the eighteenth century, in response to social and technological change, and it’s still changing today.

Wanderlust meanders all over the globe (though the Anglo-Saxon world occupies more than its fair share).  Thinking about the many themes that Solnit discusses, I came to the conclusion that, if I was going to follow her lead, it made sense to approach the history of walking by confining myself to a small country, and one I knew well – Wales.  That was the origin, some five years ago, of the book published this week, Voices on the path: a history of walking in Wales.

It would be hard to beat Wales as a country to choose for an historical study of walking.  Everywhere you look there are almost endless walking types: prehistoric footprints, Roman roads, pilgrimage journeys, Romantic pedestrians, tourists and mountaineers, processions and labour movement marches, long-distance footpaths and walking-as-art.  Threaded together, their stories build into a kind of informal, if selective and unusual, history of the country.  And because so many of the writers about walking were visitors from beyond Wales, it’s possible to create a picture of how Wales has appeared to those who were prepared, simply because they travelled on foot, to get up close to the land and its people.

From the broadly chronological flow of the narrative there emerged two critical ‘turns’ in the evolution of walking.  The first was the Romantic revolution, whose pioneers were the first to be highly self-conscious about the act of walking – as a means of experiencing the natural world in a new, intense way, and sometimes as a principled rejection of wheeled transport.  William Wordsworth walked in Wales, but I preferred to spend more time in the bracing company of his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for whom walking was both visionary and revolutionary.  I’m fortunate that so many fine writers, like Coleridge, George Borrow, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, all came to walk in Wales.

No matter how sympathetic outsiders could be to Wales and Welsh people, they couldn’t match the knowledge and emotional connection that Welsh writers felt for the country they walked through every day.  This is especially obvious when reading the Welsh-language authors quoted in the book, like R. Willams Parry, T.H. Parry-Williams, Kate Roberts, Dewi Prysor and Rhian Parry.  They provide a very different perspective on walking.

The second ‘turn’ is the eclipse of walking as a ubiquitous activity by wheeled forms of transport, and particularly the motor car.  That change was already under way in the nineteenth century with the coming of the railways, and today it’s reached its logical and destructive conclusion.  At this point the book becomes political, because, despite the apparent boom in walking as recreation, the death of walking as an everyday means of locomotion has been disastrous, for human health, biodiversity and the climate.  Somehow, we have to learn to renounce the universal use of the car and get back on our feet, if we’re going to regain a way of life that’s kinder to the planet and ourselves.

Five years is a long time to take to prepare a book.  There were several reasons. Walking is such an open-ended subject, even in a limited geographical area, that the task never seemed to be complete.  (Someone else tackling it would certainly have come up with a quite different book, even if some themes and characters are hard to ignore.)  The book has also called for a good deal of close research in primary and secondary sources, both online and in archives and libraries (Covid closed the latter for a period).  There’s also the basic difficulty that most walking goes unrecorded, right up to our time, and sources are thin and hard to find, at least until the eighteenth century.

Still, it’s been a wonderful journey of researching and writing.  It’s led me down many different tracks, some well-trodden, others obscure or overgrown. I can only hope readers will feel the same sense of delight as they pace through the pages.

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Andrew Green
Voices on the path: a history of walking in Wales
352 pages
ISBN 9781845279523
Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2024
£14.99

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