I’m walking round Britain – in my back garden

What’s the best way to keep in shape during the lockdown? That’s the First World problem I’ve been using to distract me during these strange, distressing times. My wife and teenage children are doing online workouts, but that looks far too tiring. Instead, I’m walking round Britain — in my back garden.

I got the idea from a walking trail called Walk the Planets, in Ruislip Woods, not far from where I live. It’s a round trip of about two miles, which doubles as a tour of the solar system. At a scale of five billion to one, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are barely a hundred yards apart (on the same scale the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, would be in San Francisco).

I’ve walked that route more times than I can count, and now I’m stuck at home it got me thinking: why not map out a similar walking trail around Britain, in my back garden? On a more modest scale (17,600 to one, if my maths is right), in a few minutes I can walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats and back again. As I complete each circuit fond memories come flooding back: Exmoor, Dartmoor, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales — outings I took for granted until a few weeks ago, all of them off-limits now.

It’s only now that we can’t travel that we realise how much these places mean to us — places we’ve never lived in, but places we feel a deep affection for nonetheless. ‘Tourist’ tends to be a dirty word these days but tourism is part of the history of these places — not only an essential industry, but something that connects pampered urbanites like me with the wilder corners of the country.