Brits love a walk – but we must pass that love on to our children

Hiking, ambling, strolling, rambling – there is nothing we Brits like better than a nice walk. We campaign to open up ancient footpaths; we kit ourselves out with poles and knapsacks and formidable boots; we listen to Clare Balding’s Ramblings on Radio 4 and keep a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways on the bedside table. The one thing we don’t do, apparently, is regard walking as a plausible means of getting from place to place in everyday life.

Just over a year ago the Government published its £1.2 billion plan to encourage us to cycle or walk for short journeys, rather than using a car. The plan takes a long view, with target dates of 2040 for walking and cycling to become the norm, and 2025 for 55 per cent of five- to 10-year-olds to walk to school. Perhaps it is as well that it envisages progress as a trudge rather than a sprint, for the early results are not encouraging. Figures for the first year show a fall of two per cent in the numbers of primary school pupils walking to school, and an increase of one per cent in the numbers of those being taken to school by car.

It is not hard to think of reasons why this should be, from the baleful feedback loop of driving children to school because the roads are too thronged with traffic and the air too laden with toxic exhaust fumes for them to walk safely, to the discouraging effects of the British weather (walking in the rain may be a standard trope of rom-coms, but it rather loses its charm if you have to sit through a school day steaming gently in damp clothes).

But walking, like language or musicianship, is a skill best acquired while very young. If it is not to become a means of transport as quaint (and almost as niche) as riding a horse, it has to become a part of daily routine from early childhood – as normal and essential as eating or speaking.

I began walking home from my primary school – a distance of just under a mile – when I was seven years old, and what I remember most about those daily walks is the astonishing freedom that they represented. At home and at school, someone was always telling me what to do; but between the two lay a seductive hinterland of unsupervised choice. I could decide my route: along the (pretty but perilously pavementless) country road, or through the park, where the kiosk sold aniseed balls, six for a penny. I could walk with friends, chatting; or alone, pretending to be the heroine of whichever book I was reading. I absorbed, unconsciously, the turn of the seasons, and I acquired habits of close observation, and of the mind-drift known in classroom circles as daydreaming.

These experiences certainly nourished the writer that I became (the relationship between walking and writing is almost tiresomely well documented). But what I learned as a walking child was both more fundamental, and harder for statisticians to categorise: a sense that engagement with a landscape is an everyday rite, not a holiday treat; a vivid connection between mind and body, and a sense that all of life, really, consists of putting one foot after another.

Alan Titchmarsh says that plastic topiary balls “are an affront to good taste”. Meanwhile, Monty Don claims that visiting open gardens “is bad for you”. From these conflicting horticultural views we may draw a single conclusion: A chacun son blooming goût.