THE SUNDAY TRAMPS

November 2nd 1879 saw the first outing of the Sunday Tramps – a disparate, all-male group of Victorian intellectuals who shared long walks and deep thoughts in London’s rural hinterland. The group’s founder and guide was Leslie Stephen, noted mountaineer and father of Virginia Woolf, who as a Cambridge scholar relished an energetic yomp across the Fenland plains as much as an Alpine first ascent. Covering 20 or 25 miles at a lick, their weekend walks were part health-restoring ‘constitutionals’, part brain-stimulating route marches. And often they’d break for tea with Charles Darwin or another great thinker of the day. The Sunday Tramps were also partial to trespassing (a charge the group’s sharp legal minds had no problem wangling out of).