Leisure Activities in the Outdoors: Learning, Developing and Challenging

By Mandi Baker, Neil Carr and Emma J Stewart

The benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutics, education and recreation). These benefits include the development of: health and wellbeing; social skills; leadership and facilitation skills; personal, emotional and reflective abilities; confidence and identity creation.

Drawing on a variety of perspectives, geographies and approaches, this book explores the opportunities that leisure in the outdoors provides for learning, developing and challenging. The authors in this collection challenge dominant discourses of outdoor leisure through their selection of outdoor activities, theoretical approaches and modes of representation. All offer fresh insights and thinking into how leisure in the outdoors can be understood. The book covers a range of outdoor conceptualisations that challenge the reader to think deeply and broadly about the common threads which bind the broad field of outdoor leisure together. The experiences explored in this book range from suburban outdoors to wild places, surfing to mindful reflection, and trail walking to Nordic skiing, and encompass a broad spectrum of people.

This book will appeal to outdoor scholars from a variety of contexts, including recreation, tourism, and adventure. It provides:

·original and leading research across layers of meaning attributed to and drawn from leisure experiences in the outdoors;

·value in theorising the notions of outdoor experiences;

·a variety and scope of contexts and approaches for students to draw on when learning about the field of outdoor leisure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CAB International
• Release date: Oct 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789248227

Book preview

1 Introduction: Re-thinking Leisure Activities in the Outdoors

Neil Carr¹*, Mandi Baker² and Emma J. Stewart³

¹University of Otago, New Zealand; ²Torrens University, Australia; ³Lincoln University, New Zealand

*Corresponding author: [e-mail]

© CAB International 2021. Leisure Activities in the Outdoors: Learning, Developing and Challenging (eds M. Baker et al.)

DOI: 10.1079/9781789248203.0001

Introduction

The outdoors represents a significant component of leisure and related leisure industries. Within this context it has garnered significant academic attention, mainly under the umbrella of ‘outdoor recreation’ (Jenkins and Pigram, 2003). In the academic literature and the industry promotional literature, leisure in the outdoors is viewed positively for its ability to challenge participants in multiple ways and, through this, to help them learn and develop (Ibrahim and Cordes, 2008). Indeed, the benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutic recreation, camps, education, adventure and recreation) (Humberstone et al., 2015). These benefits include the development of health and wellbeing, social/interpersonal skills, leadership and facilitation skills, personal, emotional and reflective abilities, confidence and identity creation, and technical skills. Other benefits include, of course, enjoyment, fun, escape and novelty for the individuals involved (Pigram and Jenkins, 2006; Plummer, 2009).

The origin of this book can be traced back to the call for people to suggest sessions for the 2019 Australian and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies (ANZALS) conference that was hosted in Queenstown, New Zealand, the self-proclaimed adventure capital of the world (see Walters et al., 2019). The result was a series of presentations spread across multiple sessions that all existed under the label of ‘being outdoors’. Not wishing to see the focus of these sessions lost as authors went their own ways to publish their work, the decision was made to produce a special issue in the Annals of Leisure Research focused on ‘Being Outdoors: Challenging and Celebrating Diverse Outdoor Leisure Embodiments and Experiences’. Recognizing that not everyone working in the field was able to go to the ANZALS conference the call for papers for the special issue was expanded to everyone, rather than only those who had presented at the conference. While thrilled with the submissions from this special issue, we recognized something was still missing. Many great abstracts had been submitted but they did not quite fit the remit of the special issue. On reflection, they suggested a new and important topic to be addressed within the context of outdoor leisure. This was ‘learning, developing and challenging’. Armed with this knowledge, the current book took shape, mixing those great abstracts mentioned earlier with several other chapters that came in as the book developed.

The decision to utilize the term ‘leisure activities in the outdoors’ rather than ‘outdoor recreation’ is reflective of a desire to break the boundaries that have built up around the conceptualization of outdoor recreation and, in particular, recreation. In this context, Terry Pratchett, with his usual dry humour, has talked about form influencing function. In a discussion between the auditors (who are possibly best-described as the ultimate control freaks on Discworld, Pratchett’s fantasy world) one says: ‘When water fills a jug, it takes the shape of the jug. But the water is not the jug, nor is the jug the water’ (Pratchett, 2002, p. 244). In response, Lady LeJean, a renegade auditor, who is learning to think for herself has the thought that ‘we [the auditors] were wrong. When you pour water into a jug, it becomes jug-shaped and it is not the same water any more’ (Pratchett, 2002, p. 260). Before the water enters the jug its form is unfixed, changing as it does from drops of rain, to reservoir, to pipe, or to tap. Yet when it enters the jug, it takes on the shape of the jug exactly, limited in its shape and nature by the boundaries of the jug. This is even truer if we freeze the water rather than agitating it by stirring, adding or taking some away. In this way, the jug is the boundaries of outdoor recreation, as constructed and reinforced by academics working in the field and the wider society.

The deliberate decision to not use the term or jug labelled ‘outdoor recreation’ is, therefore, meant to be liberating, to give everyone a chance to look beyond the hegemonic boundaries. It is not, however, in any way meant to be exclusionary. Rather, it is in agreement with the inclusiveness that feminism offers rather than the exclusiveness that isolationism demands. In this way, contemporary calls for critical thinking, in their positive sense, are best viewed as harking back to the original calls of feminism for the empowerment of the oppressed, be they people or ideas (Allen, 2016; Carr and Berdychevsky, in press). This is a postmodernist perspective that seeks to tear down the walls, break the water jugs, and allow new ideas and perspectives the space to breathe and flow. At the same time, it does not in the process seek to set up a situation where the jug, and the protectors and builders of it, are castigated and, in the process, excluded from the new journey due to their previous hegemonic position and dominance. That leads to simply reinventing the wheel rather than truly defining a new way of being and thinking, potentially replacing one form of dominance with another. So, in rejecting the traditional notion of outdoor recreation, this book’s focus on ‘leisure activities in the outdoors’ is inclusive of outdoor recreationists and researchers of outdoor recreation who want to come on the journey with us. As Harlene Hayne, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Otago until 2021, once said, there is room on the bus for everyone who wants to come on the journey. The only caveat, in this case, is that the dimensions, shape, structure, and reality of the bus have not been set. Potential settings for these may become apparent in the reading of this book. This can be good; it offers us ways of articulating new thinking on what inclusiveness in this space might look like or ‘be’. However, any new articulations are also dangerous, and hold the potential to do harm, if we take these bits to structure a new paradigm, in effect learning nothing from previous attempts to bind the unbindable. In the words of postmodernism (a paradigm in its own right!) let a thousand flowers bloom (Seale, 1999). Indeed, do not even worry if they are flowers or weeds. What we are talking about here is the root of anarchism, which was never meant to be about chaos but rather a different way of thinking and being to the structured lives we, as humanity, have constrained ourselves within (Dolgoff, 1971).

Anarchy was not about everyone simply doing whatever they want but a way of reconstituting society (Dolgoff, 1971). The trap to not fall into in this process is simply reinventing the wheel, creating a society that at face value is different but at base is just the same. The challenge for this book, and the reader, is exactly the same. We must give some structure because without it there is nothing but meaningless words scattered across the page. Yet the structure we give must allow the ideas to breath, to reach beyond any limits the structure provides. That requires both reader and writer to think in such a way; to recognize there are no absolutes but instead only possibilities. It is armed with these ideas that the next section of this chapter attempts to give some ideas about the nature of the book, dividing it up according to the title of the book to reflect on ‘learning’, ‘developing’ and ‘challenging’ in the context of leisure activities in the outdoors.

The suggestion that we need to leave behind preconceived ideas, to see the world beyond the deductively constructed structures that bind so much of society and academic work speaks of inductive thinking. Yet such a view demands that we can leave behind existing structures and conceptualizations, and states that doing so is beneficial. In contrast, an abductive approach considers that when seeking to look beyond existing structures and conceptualizations critically engaging with such entities as part of the process of looking beyond them can be beneficial (Gioia et al., 2013; Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). In essence, an abductive approach is what this book is calling for. It is asking readers to critically engage with and look beyond existing structures. It is this abductive approach that results in leisure being utilized as the umbrella term rather than recreation. A truly inductive approach would not employ any terms, resulting in a potentially liberating space but also a one that would be so unstructured as to be meaningless.

It is necessary to pause for a moment, before heading to the next section, to consider what we mean by ‘leisure’, ‘leisure activities’ and the ‘outdoors’. In doing so, it is not our intention to launch into a detailed discussion and critique of the meanings of these terms. Rather, we acknowledge that such discussions have already, to varying degrees and with varying outcomes, occurred elsewhere. So instead, the aim is to highlight the contested nature of these terms and to suggest that this contestation, which can be read as the presentation of diverse ideas, is actually a strength rather than a weakness. Such multiple and contested meanings enable diversity of opinions and as a result open up discussions beyond defined and constructed boundaries. Leisure is a highly contested term. Carr (2017) is among the most recent to have publicly delved into the debate about what leisure may be, focusing on the idea of freedom being central to leisure and in the process questioning just how widespread leisure really is. This may be seen merely as one of the more recent works to continue the long running argument concerning whether leisure is about freedom, fun, enjoyment, relaxation, time away from work, activities, self, or some mixture of all, or some, of these. Leisure studies academics argue about whether leisure is a consumerist and social product or about the individual. They argue whether leisure is related to recreation, tourism and events, and what, if any, is the nature of these relationships (more detailed discussions of the meaning of leisure can be found in works such as: Blackshaw, 2010; Page and Connell, 2010; Rojek, 2010; Veal, 2019). Embracing all of these meanings and possible permutations is, we suggest, empowering, a source of strength rather than an admittance of weakness.

Within this context, the definition of leisure we utilize in this book is not what we would traditionally see as a ‘definition’, that is something that is limiting, that constructs boundaries to hem in what we want and exclude what we do not. Instead, we suggest that leisure can be all of these things in any permutation you wish and can probably be a bunch of other things that have yet to be thought of, at least by us. Is this a departure from Carr’s (2017) views on leisure as freedom? Quite possibly, but then change is not necessarily a bad thing, is it! This stance on what we mean by leisure flows into a similarly broad definition of ‘leisure activities’. Beyond incorporating the breadth of academic definitions, when looking at ‘activities’ we must also incorporate what those taking part in (either through actively engaging or passively viewing) activities define as leisure activities. In this way, we view those we seek to understand as part of an integrated research process rather than merely objects to be observed, poked and prodded. In this way, definitions of ‘leisure activities’ are a production of a meeting of the minds of researchers and researched in a collectivist approach (Baker, 2020), one that recognizes and embraces change and diversity and is, as such, inclusive of difference.

Not adopting ‘outdoor recreation’ allows the book and its authors to explore the outdoors beyond the dominant boundaries associated with outdoor recreation. This is primarily, though not uniformly, associated with an idealized outdoors that gives primacy to natural landscapes, places beyond the urban environment. In this way, outdoor recreation is not just associated with ‘outside of a building’ but outside of an overtly human constructed environment. Indeed, speaking about urbanization, Hales and Low Choy (2012, p. 127) stated it has ‘resulted in the loss of land for outdoor recreation opportunities’, as if the urban environment lacks an outdoors. This has led to claims of elitism and exclusion against outdoor recreation, which has been dominated by whiteness and masculinity (Zink and Kane, 2015; Low et al., 2020). Adopting a wider definition of outdoors that is uninhibited by association with outdoor recreation allows us to explore the ‘other’ outdoors and the access of the ‘other’ to the outdoors. Consequently, the definition of outdoors highlighted in and through this book is all-inclusive, truly incorporating everything beyond the four walls of the home. In this way, while recognizing ingrained social constructions of elitism regarding the outdoors that gives varying levels of social capital to differing forms of the outdoors the definition of outdoors employed in this book looks at many forms of the outdoors and challenges such elitism and associated exclusionary practices.

Learning, Developing and Challenging

Having defined the grounding of this book as one that seeks not just to understand and expand knowledge but to challenge dominant paradigms, it is logical that the book, and the chapters within it, should also seek to display and offer learning opportunities. Such opportunities are associated with challenge, recognizing that learning can come through challenging, both the limits of what we know and what we think we know (Falk and Dierking, 2002). In this way, Kidd and Czerniawski (2011, p. 137) have stated that ‘Irrespective of the language and discourse adopted – the notion that teachers need to cater for learners’ needs and all learners need to be stretched and challenged is essential for motivating and engagement’. Through learning comes opportunities for development at both the individual and societal levels. In this way, the book itself offers learning opportunities through its questioning and alternative presentations of the experiences of people in outdoor leisure environments and the barriers they face accessing such spaces. The book also depicts and analyses learning experiences of people in outdoor leisure environments and the challenges they experience as they journey through and engage with outdoor leisure. As such, the book offers multiple perspectives on learning, both direct and indirect, active and passive. Through this we see how outdoor leisure can be a positive learning experience about the world around us and our ‘selves’. Doing so enables everyone to gain learning through leisure and to help enable such experiences in a way that empowers participants. This recognizes that positive learning experiences are strongly associated with the willing and active engagement of participants in the process. The nature of the outdoor leisure experience is seen as helping to facilitate such learning, given it is clearly differentiated from the traditional classroom where less willing and actively engaged learning has often been forced upon people (Carr, 2011).

There is only so much the editors and authors can do. We can show and talk about experiences but the reader must engage with the material to take us forward, not just to learn from the material but to take engagement with and access to outdoor leisure experiences forward. Therefore, this is a call for readers to be active readers. It is also a call for them to not simply conform to traditional constructs of academics and university students who are focused on their own careers or degree journeys that result in a focus on outcomes (i.e. journal articles, essays, dissertations, etc.) but to engage with the world beyond the walls of the university as well. In doing so, it is a call to activism, to engagement with the foundations of feminism that seek to help empower the disempowered. Such calls to activism may be said to fit with recent calls by funding bodies, governments, and the wider society for academic research to have an impact in the ‘real world’ (Doyle, 2018). Yet a call to activism is not simply a call to meet the latest KPIs (key performance indicators) imposed upon academics or tick boxes students are encouraged to achieve in the never-ending aim of gaining an advantage over competitors in the post-degree job market (Carr and Berdychevsky, in press). Instead, it is a call to altruistic activism, where the focus is on how we can help, rather than what we can gain, from doing so. Is there anything inherently wrong with self-gain in the process of helping the other? No, but if it becomes the dominant reason for doing so the chances of success, where the disempowered are empowered, are degraded as the authenticity of the intention is lost.

Based on this interpretation of learning, developing and challenging, this book should not be read as ‘the’ answer. Far from it. Rather, this book is better viewed as a beginning, an opportunity to look beyond what has already been produced, in and outside of academia, about outdoor leisure and to seek new and productive ways to enhance positive access to the outdoors for all that does not seek to denigrate and/or place on a pedestal different types of outdoors or those seeking to or accessing it. In this way, the book should be read as a start rather than a finish.

Book Structure and Content

While learning, developing and challenging are concepts that are central to the book, they are so intertwined that they offer a poor manner in which to structure it. There is a strong tendency for the individual chapters to cover all of these concepts, albeit in often distinctly different ways.

The book begins with a series of chapters that on the face of it speak in many ways to the outdoor recreation trope. They are focused around the link between outdoor leisure and wellbeing. In addition, they are strongly linked to the dominant imagery of outdoor recreation as male and white dominated. Yet a second glance begins to show significant challenges to this being raised through all of these chapters. The second chapter, by Nick Davies, talks about the diversity of recreational walking preferences and experiences, and is situated within Stebbins’s (2017) concept of serious leisure. In doing so, it recognizes the need to and value of seeing walking as broadly defined rather than constraining it to a macho imagery of the ‘serious’ (in a machismo sense rather than Stebbins’ concept). As such, the chapter begins to point towards the widening of ideas around outdoor leisure, pointing out that something as mundane as walking has a valid and important place in understanding outdoor leisure and that casual walking rather than just its serious companion has its place in outdoor leisure. The third chapter by chance remains in the same study locale, the English Lake District, and further challenges the dominant image of outdoor recreation. Natasha Shuttleworth and Chris Hughes take the reader on an emotive journey through the link between outdoor recreation and mental wellbeing. In so doing, they discard the imagery of the outdoor recreationist as the tough, rugged male control-freak. Instead, they show how strength and wellbeing can be gained through outdoor leisure. This non-medicalized approach to the analysis and representation of wellbeing, something that has been called for (Mansfield et al., 2020), is another dominant feature of all the contributions to this book. Chapter 4, by Eduard Inglés et al. focuses on the impacts of a five-day Nordic skiing camp on individual and group physical and emotional wellbeing. As a study with a male-only sample it at first glance clearly fits the dominant image of outdoor recreation. While the chapter reaffirms the suggestion that outdoor recreation can be beneficial to wellbeing in doing so it undermines the dominant imagery. Instead, it suggests the participants are emotionally sensitive and aware, more complex entities than emotionally constipated hegemonic male has been identified as. In doing so it questions the simplicity of such identities (Carr, 2021). The final chapter in this group, by Ron McCarville and Chantel Conlon, focuses on the hiking of the Appalachian Trail and the wellbeing of those who undertake it. In doing so, the chapter deals with the challenges entailed and their often demanding nature that align with dominant notions in outdoor recreation of the challenge as a masculine style sado-masochistic experience to be overcome. However, there are many more complex layers to this chapter. It speaks not just of individual (man against nature) journeys, but more importantly of the creation of communities, both online and on-trail. The chapter deals with the notion of the hero’s journey but the depictions are not of heroes akin to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape or some such hegemonic masculine ideal. Instead, it is of a much more nuanced, strong yet simultaneously vulnerable hero.

The next three chapters continue to challenge how we think about outdoor leisure, although in a more direct manner, focusing on the outdoor leisure experiences of women. This section begins with the chapter by Yi Chien Jade Ho and Pei Ting Tham, which looks at the experiences of Asian women in outdoor leisure and how such spaces are socially constructed as exclusionary rather than inclusive. In doing so, the chapter challenges us to reimagine and redefine the outdoors and leisure within it. The next chapter, by Vinathe Sharma-Brymer similarly talks about the barriers women seeking to access outdoor leisure, as leisure or workscape, face discrimination and associated barriers. This chapter is focused on women in India. While noting the barriers and discrimination of the women she interviewed, Vinathe also speaks about how the women she studied resist and disrupt the dominant masculine discourse of the outdoors in general and outdoor leisure in particular. The final chapter in this group, by Susan Houge Mackenzie and Eliza Raymond, focuses on the position of women as adventure tourism guides. This chapter differs from the previous two in that the data on which it is based was collected in New Zealand from women from a variety of western countries. However, it again shows women having to fight to overcome barriers to experiencing outdoor leisure, as workers or leisured people and the related implications for wellbeing. This speaks of a need to recognize that not all challenges (the challenge of overcoming discrimination in this instance) are necessarily positive in terms of individual wellbeing.

The third section of the book focuses on another group that has often been absent in representations of outdoor recreation; namely, children and families. The first of these chapters, by Camilla Hodge et al. theorizes the links between outdoor leisure and intra-family cohesion. This cohesion is situated within the context of improving wellbeing through overcoming social isolation. The chapter pushes traditional definitions of family, expanding it to fit the increasingly diverse reality of families in the 21st century. It also questions the traditional focus of leisure studies on the individual, recognizing that leisure can also be, and often is, relational. The next chapter, by Erin Sharpe et al. follows the recognition that children are active social agents, whose voice needs to be heard and listened to. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on conflicted meanings behind children riding as an outdoor leisure activity, with children and parents having differing views. Listening to the children offers opportunities to challenge dominant discourses. The final chapter in this section is by Sue Waite et al. It brings together many of the issues raised in the rest of the chapters in the book, talking about disadvantaged children and young peoples’ access to nature and outdoor leisure, and how this can be achieved. In doing so, the chapter builds on critiques of what is meant by the outdoors in outdoor recreation, and where and how nature fits in this.

The final section of the book builds on the chapter by Waite et al. looking at how engagement with and learning in the outdoor leisure experience can be facilitated and encouraged. The chapter by Jason King et al. provides an ecological perspective on leadership in outdoor adventurous activity. While supporting the idea that leadership is key to successful outdoor leisure experiences, the chapter highlights criticism of the dominance of hegemonic masculinity thinking in the field that has emphasized challenges in the context of risk taking and danger. Instead, the chapter suggests an ecological framework that has the potential to provide a more inclusive and beneficial outdoor leisure environment where challenge is re-imagined in a positive and inclusive context. The next chapter, by Anthony Deringer et al., directly links to the one by Waite et al. by focusing on nature. Specifically, it talks about mindful place-based education (PBE) and how this approach can deepen peoples’ connection with nature and cultural understanding. Both Deringer et al. and Waite et al. speak to attempts to deepen the connection between nature and people through involvement in outdoor leisure. However, they come at this from very different directions, Deringer et al. dealing with, relatively, privileged university students while Waite et al. focuses on children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The book concludes with a final chapter by the editors. This reflects on the contributions of the chapters and the key themes that emerged. This chapter concludes with some reflections on where those working in the field might want to go next, having challenged the dominant paradigm of recreation research in the outdoors. In doing so, the chapter reflects on how we might want to get there. In this way, as with the book as a whole, the final chapter is more about beginnings than an end.

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Section 1: Outdoor Leisure and Wellbeing

2 Understanding the Diversity of Recreational Walking Preferences and Experiences: Casual and Serious Walkers in the English Lake District

Nick Davies*

Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

*Corresponding author: [e-mail]

© CAB International 2021. Leisure Activities in the Outdoors: Learning, Developing and Challenging (eds M. Baker et al.)

DOI: 10.1079/9781789248203.0002

Introduction: Studying Motivations for Recreational Walking

Recreational walking is by sheer numbers the most popular outdoor activity (Outdoor Foundation, 2018; Roy Morgan Research, 2018; World Health Organization Europe, 2018). Despite this fact there are no studies that compare walking activities and frequencies across different nations. Nationally independently derived measurements of recreational walking are difficult to compare. As an example, statistics in England vary in the way they are framed. Sport England, the national sport agency, measured recreational walking in their Active Lives survey without defining duration, finding that over 20 million people (approximately one third of the population) participated in ‘walking for leisure’ and a smaller number (approximately 15 million) were ‘walking for travel’ in a 28 day period in 2019 (Sport England, 2019). Natural England, the national government advisory body for the outdoors, release a ‘Monitoring Engagement of the Natural Environment’ report annually. They provide a percentage (56%) of people visiting the outdoors who ‘choose to walk through local parks or green spaces on way to other places’ (Natural England, 2019, p. 7). Meanwhile, VisitEngland, in a study which only encompassed international visitors, found 55% of holidaymakers engaged in walking-focused holidays in a 3–5 year period (Visit England, 2016).

The problem is that for many academics and interested practitioners or policymakers, walking means something different. In adventure tourism research, studies generally focus on tourist activity in wild landscapes. They use walking behaviour to understand the future of wilderness landscapes and the industry (Furunes and Mykletun, 2012), and exploring outdoor leadership approaches for guiding participants in hillwalking and mountaineering to understand the individualized nature of experiences (Carson et al., 2020). Furthermore, research in this field seeks to categorize the range of outdoor activities by pitting walking as the lowest-risk, but most accessible activity, at one end of a soft–hard or passive–active spectrum against activities such as bungee-jumping at the other end (Page et al., 2005). Although studies refer to walking, hill-walking, hiking and mountaineering as separate activities (Pomfret, 2006; Perrey and Fabre, 2008), for the purpose of this chapter walking is defined as encompassing all of these, including walks undertaken on flat routes and mountains that do not involve specialist climbing equipment.

In urban and peri-urban settings, increasing the number of people walking for both utility and recreational purposes fulfils important policy goals for physical activity and the reduction of carbon based pollution by replacing short car trips. Stakeholders are interested in urban design and population density, duration and distance of walking trips, and demographic variables such as level of education, ethnicity and income to understand who is walking more and who is likely to in the future (Agrawal and Schimek, 2007). The experience and personal context of the walker in outdoor settings is crucial in unpicking the relative diversity of interests, definitions and motivations of walking. Who is walking, how and where are they walking, and what experiences are they gaining from it?

There are multiple merits associated with understanding more about the range of types of walking and the behaviours of people undertaking walking as an outdoor activity. Managers of National Parks and sensitive areas can benefit from understanding the route choices of walkers, by ascertaining the most frequented routes and visited points, and allocating resources accordingly (Orellana et al., 2012). Similarly, there is a large market for guided walks in tourist areas, walking holidays and self-guided long distance trails but in general each of these tourism activities requires more research to better understand motivations (Tolley et al., 2001; den Breejen, 2007).

This chapter will discuss the findings of a year-long survey of recreational walkers in the English Lake District to highlight the variety of contextual drivers of recreational walking and the motivations and experiences of recreational walkers. The research sought to tease out differences between walkers to develop a typology of walking tourists, and explore the range of associated motivations, the nature of people’s