Daisy Dunn

Why do writers enjoy walking so much?

BBC radio has dedicated several programmes to the pursuit. Most engaging was Professor Jonathan Bate retracing Wordsworth's visit to revolutionary France

Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a pencil,’ we cry, before tootling along the tarmac à la Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin or George Sand. BBC Radio likes walking, too, to judge by the number of programmes dedicated to the pursuit this fortnight.

Some revolve around mental health and the environment; Clare Balding saunters over Berkshire’s Winter Hill in Ramblings with Steve Backshall and Helen Glover discussing wellbeing, parenthood and sewage. More involve the walking writer, with five authors retracing memorable ambulations on Radio 3, and Professor Jonathan Bate taking us on an altogether more dreamlike journey for In Wordsworth’s Footsteps on Radio 4.

Bate’s is the most engaging series. In the second of three episodes, he follows the Romantic poet into revolutionary Paris, where the ground is soaked in blood. The Tuileries Palace has been stormed, the Swiss Guard slaughtered, and the aristocracy crushed in the September Massacres of 1792. It is not the first time Wordsworth has visited the city, and he is shocked and distressed by what he sees. In his autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’, he writes of ‘the fear gone by/ Pressed on me almost like a fear to come’. And yet, even in his poems of lament, there is an optimism to his voice. As Alice Oswald observes in the programme, Wordsworth tends to sound ‘vigorously, walkingly healthy’ in his poems. This is part of what makes them so readable.

Wordsworth was certainly a passionate walker. But what comes to the fore in this episode is less his curiosity as a traveller and more his kindness. During his time in France, he fell in love with a woman named Annette Vallon, who gave birth to his child, Caroline.

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