A GOOD walk doesn’t need a purpose to solve many ills—the feeling of movement is joyful and liberating in itself—but the idea of enfolding an ambition into a long-distance walk or pilgrimage is recapturing imagination. This is in part thanks to Raynor Winn’s exhilarating 2018 book, The Salt Path, which gave a masterclass in pace. Here, five more people set off on their personal odysseys.
In February last year, Roger Morgan-Grenville, a former army officer-turned-Nature writer, left the Solent in Hampshire to walk the length of the country to Cape Wrath in Sutherland to see if it would make him optimistic or pessimistic about Britain’s biodiversity. As he planned to cover nearly 1,000 miles in eight weeks, one has to question how much he would see, but the military planning for Across a Walking Land is awesome.
He finds huge local pride, but also the sense of a creaking infrastructure
The author is a curlew enthusiast—its magical, bubbling call is a recurring theme—so the first stop is at a successful conservation project in the New Forest, where
