If Christmas is synonymous with hours spent indoors, the lure of the sofa and endless screen time, our second festive season spent under the shadow of Covid is taking those things to their extremes. Our lives are full of cautious friends and relatives and we have to stay where we are. The cold and dark are the last two parts of the picture. This could be a season of seclusion.
Millions of us will be going for walks to temporarily escape, which is something that many of us have coped with over the past two years. In the first three months of this year, Sport England said that there had been an increase in the number of people who had recently engaged in walking for leisure. The number of walks of a mile or more has jumped by 26% in a single year, according to research published by the Department for Transport in September. In the second half of 2020, the charity and membership organisation that does a lot of work around walking and access to open spaces recruited 30% more new members than it had done a year earlier. It is possible that these numbers are proof that when leisure options are suddenly shut down, a lot of us seek solace in one of the most primordial pastimes there is.
At which point, an admission. I can't imagine life without walking, I am fortunate enough to do so, and I can't imagine life without it. I became an urban walker when I lived in London in my 20s and 30s. I moved out of the city and became a parent and that's when walking became a weekly ritual.
I spend most of the Sunday mornings with my two kids wandering around where we live in Somerset. We have visited a lot of other places, including the South Downs, which runs parallel to the coast between Winchester and Eastbourne. Our wellbeing has been bound up with the pleasures of exploring our immediate surroundings, and discovering things that were just outside the front door, since Covid restrictions have kept us at home.
My dad was a keen mountaineer and the son of a south Welsh miner. He got the bug from his older brother, who was the one who dramatised the mass trespass of the Peak District in the 1930s, which led to the creation of the UK. The roots of this kind of activism are not that different from the ones that made it famous in the late 19th century, and they have not gone away. There is a constant echo of what happened when the people of the area came together, and how far there is still to go.
There is still a story to be told about the so-called right to roam and the contrast between its dire limitations in England and Wales and the way that Scotland has been opened up. Five years ago, there was a beautifully symbolic story about the Aberdeenshire golf resort owned by Donald Trump. The Ferret unearthed police documents that show the Trump organisation believes that the land is private and that they will be able to restrict access. This is a potential area of conflict that will need to be managed diplomatically.
It's almost by definition that walking any distance highlights the basics of our relationship with our environment: small wonder, then, that something as seemingly innocent as a love of being outside and moving around still creates flashpoints.
The politics of diversity are the focus of a growing story about walking, and what needs to happen to make it a popular pursuit. I had a half-hour conversation with Cherelle Harding, a youth worker who lives in Coventry and has recently founded an organisation called Steppers UK, which aims to help black, Asian and ethnic minority communities to build positive relationships with the outdoors. She told me that she was annoyed that she didn't see more black people out hiking. She talked about the fact that her parents and grandparents had come to a hostile country and the fact that there were no images of the great outdoors of black and brown people.
The Black Girls Hike, founded in Manchester in 2019, and the Steppers, founded in Manchester in 2020, are both about the same ethos and are related to the Covid crisis. She said that a lot of people from black communities have faced trauma. What we are doing is about joy.
Here, perhaps, is the simple key to why people walk in both rural and urban environments. Iain Sinclair, the writer and walker, said that moving around on foot opens up your system to the world and makes the skin porous. We all know that prejudice, traffic, locked gates, signs and other things get in the way.
The stories of people who were stopped by the police for walking because they were not a threat to public health, and of people who were stopped because they were connected to a world beyond their walls, were important to me. It's an alternative to gloom and seclusion, and fresh air, social distance, and modest wonders of getting from one point to the next are all positives.
John Harris writes for the Guardian.
