Long-distance walking is all the rage these days. There are all-nighters staged by charities, for instance the annual MoonWalk in London, which raises funds to fight breast cancer: participants of both sexes walk marathon and half-marathon routes wearing bras. The outfits might have changed, but when it comes to foot-slogging, long-distance has a long history.
Charles Dickens liked a nocturnal ramble. He did it to combat sleeplessness, and on one particular night in October 1857 walked the 30 miles from his house in Tavistock Square to his country home in Kent. In the essay Night Walks he describes passing Bethlehem Hospital (the psychiatric institution from which we get the word ‘bedlam’), and wondering how different its inhabitants were from the rest of us: ‘Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?’ At dawn Dickens would head for a railway station to watch the mail come in. Only when daylight appeared would he feel tired enough to go home and sleep.
Many writers use walking for inspiration. Thoreau said that ‘the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow’. It isn’t just writers, either — Erik Satie composed his music while walking, often at night, and when Paris’s streetlamps were blacked out during the first world war he found it difficult to work.
Another motivation is money. During the 18th and 19th centuries Britain enjoyed a boom in ‘pedestrianism’, the undertaking of long-distance walks for wagers. Originally aristocrats pitted their footmen against each other (please don’t let Jacob Rees-Mogg read this — he might get ideas).
But then along came people who were prepared to do the legwork themselves. In 1788, Foster Powell walked 100 miles in 21 hours, 35 minutes.
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