There’s no greater escape from the din of modernity than a Boxing Day walk under winter’s torn, rolling skies

BOxING Day, when the country wakes up slowly, pulls back the curtains and thinks about taking a walk, is a serene and lovely time.

The country rises lackadaisical and reflective. No normal rhythm dictates the day — the claims of the radio, the call of the road, the clock’s insistence are all suspended. There are the sales, if you can still face shopping, but better by far in an older, gentler tradition, is the Boxing Day walk.

It evolved in its own way for its own reasons, detached from commerce, religion and politics. No one knows how many of us will head out — though the National Trust and National Parks expect a jump in numbers of hikers today — and there is no single reason why we do.

To work off all the eating and drinking. To try out Christmas presents, children’s bicycles, bows, arrows and Nerf guns. To settle emotions born of much close contact indoors with family.

But above all we do it to ‘get some air’, in that delightful, ordinary phrase, a shorthand for remembering who we are in the light of day and for finding out, all over again, what an ordinary hour in the world is like.

Glitters

And the world is different now. Christmas still glitters and sparkles but its stresses and pressures have passed. If the baby Jesus was born in the manger yesterday, then today he mostly sleeps. The shepherds are back with their flocks, the Wise Men have again turned their camels eastward. The rest of us recycle wrapping paper and think about where to stroll.

Today’s forecast is typically British. Clear or rainy overhead, depending on where you are, winter’s rolling skies torn and runnelled with bright patches like melted light. Muddy underfoot, this is a kestrel-coloured and moss-lined time, the grass rainswept and saturated, the woods a mulch.

We will step out into air that is not very cold, into a landscape snowy only on the highest ground, while the rest of the countryside brims with duns and soft colours.

It is a rich time for the senses, the keel of the year, small birdsong clear in the bare woods. The streams are loud, the rivers swollen, perhaps too swollen.

To step out today is to contemplate new normalities, our temperate climate ever more capable of rumbustious extremes, our nature, for so long so gentle, going powerfully about new business.

Pigeons in Manchester Victoria have hatched squabs, months early. There are green shoots in the flower pot outside my front door. As naturalists learn early, the world knows no stasis. A good walk, well observed, will be full of the unexpected, the telling and transporting.

Gangs of long- tailed tits scout the gardens like backstage clowns in their pink and black. The wind wheels in unfurling rushes, as if thwarted and searching for loose leaves to kick. Trees and gutters drip, crows rasp and lapwings cry pee- wit! over the uplands. Pheasants shout at the sound of thunder or guns.

Boxing Day shoots and hunts are not for me but I can understand the hunters’ thrill at going out into the landscape, sharp- eyed and seeking. It would make sense that those of us who have abandoned blood lust retain a species-memory of stalking, tracking and spotting as we scan the woods and fields while we walk. Our eyes are evolved to spy what creatures are abroad with us.

Outside our house in West Yorkshire runs a lane to a National Trust wood. At first it belongs to my neighbours, walking dogs and stretching legs. There may be a deer in the meadow.

The sight of one makes a child of me — the way they seem to slip out of a rent in time, from an older England; the way they hold themselves, poised, listening to landscapes we cannot hear; their trick of unhurried vanishing. Next, on Boxing Day, come the first walkers. Often they are elderly, early risers retired fit. They are cheery.

Later come the young family groups, children straggling or bounding ahead, and later still, with the day rolling on, come the clusters of friends, couples and triumvirates of young people deep in conversation.

Sacred

Our doorstep is my favourite writing place, an ideal spot to eavesdrop and observe as the Boxing Day walk reaches full spate. The British are held to be a reserved people, but it is not so when we are out and walking. Everyone nods and greets everyone else. Dog owners exchange almost as much information as their pets.

‘ What’s your name? What is he? Oh aren’t you lovely? Hello!’

‘Chip? He’s an all- sorts. We don’t really know! Come on Chip! Don’t jump up…’

Soon they are asking after each other’s Christmases. Later they will want to know if you had a good walk, and how old is that pup? Here in the North, dogs are sacred. They are welcomed everywhere and it is a solid tradition that a Boxing Day walk will include a dog-friendly pub.

Ours is the magnificent Pack Horse Inn, also known as the Ridge, up above us between the moors and the reservoirs at Widdop. It has been serving hardy customers since 1610 — you have to be pretty hardy to get there.

Four hundred years ago, Boxing Day was still the feast of Saint Stephen. Though the giving of gifts or money, ‘Christmas Boxes’, was established back then, the day had yet to be branded.

Ever since then, people from both sides of the watershed, coming either from Hebden

Bridge like us or from Burnley over the other side, have trudged up from their valleys and across the skirts of the curlewed moors to meet in front of the hearths of the Pack Horse, sheltered by massively thick walls from the prowl and wuther of the gales.

Our walk will be full of our boy’s chatter, the dog’s misadventures and our own conversation, mostly about family and friends. Politics and economics, thank goodness, will seem distant niggles best left for another time.

Groups of friends and family will hold at least three conversations simultaneously: adult, child and internal, as we sift what has been and idly contemplate what is to come.

It is particularly pleasing to meet your equivalents coming the other way — dogs greet each other, mothers grin, children pause suddenly to take one another in as fathers (we have our own secret codes, of course) exchange small, amused and respectfully knowing nods.

Boxing Day walks cross all faiths and cultures. One of the joys of our evolved and evolving multiculturalism is that, certainly in our woods, Hardcastle Crags, people of Po l i s h , Pak i s t a n i , Welsh, Jewish, Lithuanian, Lancastrian and Yorkshire descent nod and smile and mooch along, all equal under British skies.

Spiced

I was alarmed to learn that this week that walking to burn off food and drink is best done

before you eat and imbibe — and that it takes 21 minutes of running to offset the calories of a single mince pie.

Stuff that! Since Tudor times, sugared and spiced food has been central to the English winter feast. A sweet tooth and the love of food unite most of us at this time of year — as they should.

Boxing Day walks are not about achievement or compensation. We do them for simple and innocent pleasure — a desire for a quiet note in the middle of being, so often muffled by the nonsense and noise of modernity.

The best reason there can be for doing anything.