This is a wonderful and difficult book; more, as John Carey said in his review, ‘almost not a book at all, more a window into another mind.’ It records Ann Wroe’s thoughts and jottings during walks on the South Downs.

In November 1912 Hardy’s first wife, Emma, died; they had been married for 38 years. By the end of 1912 Hardy had realised that, to recall Emma with the warmth he desperately wanted, he would have to revisit the scenes where they had been happiest, in Cornwall, where she had grown up and they had met.

At the heart of this book is a detailed account of the neuroscience of navigation. We have brain cells dedicated to locating our position on a grid, calculating our speed of travel and working out our position and orientation relative to boundaries and edges.

I had intended this book to appear on the website a short time before the club’s visit to Selworthy at the end of October as Nicolson set out to walk, physically and spiritually, in the footsteps of the two poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy in their roamings from June 1797 to September 1798…

Eric Newby was born in 1919. In 1940 he joined the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he was an outstanding cadet and then joined the Special Boat Section. He was taken prisoner of war after raiding a German airfield in Sicily. He later escaped but was recaptured, a story which is the basis for his book, ‘Love and War in the Apennines’.

Raynor Winn’s ‘The Salt Path’, published in 2018, two years after completing the South West Coast Path, many parts of which will be known to BRC members, has become an international bestseller and probably one of the best known books about a long-distance walk published in recent years.

The City in Eleven Walks/Rainer Maria Rilke & Birgit Haustedt

There is, of course, no shortage of writers who can and will be discussed here in the future and when I originally came up with the idea many names immediately came to mind: Rilke was not one of them.

Flora Thompson is best known – perhaps only known – for her trilogy of books about life in the Victorian countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. It’s the semi-fictionalized story of a poor but ambitious girl called Laura (a version of her younger self) growing up and making do in a small Oxfordshire village at the end of the 19th century.

This section will cover a wide selection of writers, both fiction and non-fiction, and will include both those who specialise in writing specifically about walking, whilst in other cases it is simply an important part of the narrative. Writers who go on long journeys but do little walking (by rail for example) will not be included but there are many who make long journeys by various means, including walking, and they will be: Robert Byron was one of the these.

Writers, Walks and Journeys - In our ‘Literature’ section you will find extracts from literature about walking and travel, including both prose and poetry of all genres, periods and countries.