The Short History of Walking for Pleasure

Did you know that the idea of walking for its own sake (not just a means of getting from one place to another) is relatively new to human history? In fact, the English verb “to hike” (meaning to walk for pleasure in open country) dates back a mere 200 years. And the noun “hiking” appears for the first time in the 20^th century. So what happened to get human beings to start talking about the joy of walking?

Morris Marples (Shanks’s Pony: A Study of Walking) said the Brits are to blame. In his book, the first to examine the history of walking in his native land, Marples explained that a people who lived on an island were naturally seafaring, given to travel and “came of a mixed and restless ancestry.” At any rate, most of the early writers to celebrate writing as pleasure were either 19^th century British or those like America’s Henry David Thoreau who were influenced by them.

And there’s another thing: These people did their writing in what we English teachers call the Romantic Period in literature (roughly late 1700s to mid-to-late 1800s). These were the days of novelists Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin; poets like Lord Bryon, John Keats, Percy Shelly and the most influential, William Wordsworth; and naturalists like William Hazelitt, whose “On Going a Journey” is considered the first essay on the subject. One thing the Romantics had in common was an almost fanatic love for nature and—it seems—the out-of-doors is something experienced best on foot. So the love of walking shows not only in the novels, poems and essays of the time, but in the lives of its writers themselves. Wordsworth, who was still walking 10 miles a day in his 80s, is said to have walked an incredible 186,000 miles in his lifetime.

Does my heart good to know my favorite poet enjoyed my favorite pastime.