Do you want to escape to a remote and wild place? Join the queue…

In his 2007 book, The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane observed that “time and again, wildness has been declared dead in Britain and Ireland”, noting that the novelists EM Forster and John Fowles, and the travel writer Jonathan Raban, had written elegies for Britain’s defunct wilderness. As National Map Reading Week begins, Ordnance Survey confirmed that nowhere on the mainland is further than six miles from a road. “I don’t think there is any genuine wilderness left in Britain,” said the broadcaster Nicholas Crane.

The erosion of wilderness is not a local problem: Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist on Easter Island, recently deplored the damage inflicted by hordes of tourists, keen to take selfies with the island’s ancient stone statues; while Nirmal Purja’s photograph of climbers queuing near the summit of Everest showed a line of tourists straggling to the horizon, like determined shoppers at some hellish snow-bound sale. The danger of congestion was highlighted by the latest climber to die on the mountain, Robin Haynes Fisher, who predicted that “delays caused by overcrowding could prove fatal”.

Yet the people who most eloquently deplore the vanishing of wild places seem implacably convinced of their own right to visit them.

Robert Macfarlane wrote of his need for wildness: “To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.” His book became a bestseller. Any reader following him to the places he describes would now, presumably, find them busy with fellow bookfanciers. Nicholas Crane described visiting an uninhabited Hebridean island with his wife, who “burst into tears when a sea-kayaker turned up”. The kayaker probably felt much the same.

This sense of

exceptionalism has made our most remote landscapes as populous as shopping malls. “Might it be the case that it’s not the travellers who move, but rather it’s the world beneath their feet picking up speed while they remain static?” wrote Roger Willemsen in The Ends of the Earth.

Now that we can circumnavigate the globe to escape ourselves, only to find ourselves waiting at our destination, Pascal’s observation, that all human misfortune comes from not knowing how to sit quietly in a room, has never seemed more apposite.

The actress Emily Beecham, named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, joked that she was in such a rush to get to the event that she forgot her toothbrush. She is not alone. In our house, every journey is haunted by a sense of questing dread about The Thing That Has Been Forgotten.

I have been known to unpack the suitcase with the taxi waiting outside, just to check that I have remembered the thing we forgot last time. But when we arrive, something is invariably missing. If nothing else, it brings an invigorating uncertainty to the predictability of modern travel.

Baroness Trumpington, who died last November aged 96, proved as spirited in death as she was in life (she once gave the Duke of Edinburgh an ingenious device known as a “wife leader”). She insisted that her obsequies be “jolly occasions” and left £500 in her will for House of Lords staff to give a party in her memory. There was a single teasing proviso: this was strictly a Downstairs knees-up. No Lords allowed.