Walking in the United Kingdom
Walking is one of the most popular outdoor recreational activities in the United Kingdom, and within England and Wales there is a comprehensive network of rights of way that permits access to the countryside. Furthermore, access to much uncultivated and unenclosed land has opened up since the enactment of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. In Scotland the ancient tradition of universal access to land was formally codified under the Land Reform Act 2003. In Northern Ireland, however, there are few rights of way, or other access to land.
Walking is used in the United Kingdom to describe a range of activity, from a walk in the park to trekking in the Alps. The word "hiking" is used in the UK, but less often than walking; the word rambling is also used, and the main organisation that supports walking is called The Ramblers. Walking in mountainous areas in Britain is called hillwalking, or in Northern England, including the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, fellwalking, from the dialect word fell for high, uncultivated land. Mountain walking can sometimes involve scrambling.
File:Ivinghoe Beacon seen from The Ridgeway.jpg|thumb|Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, seen looking north from the Ridgeway
File:Keswick Panorama - Oct 2009.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Skiddaw mountain, the town of Keswick, Cumbria and Derwent Water seen from Walla Crag, Lake District, England
History
The idea of undertaking a walk through the countryside for pleasure developed in the 18th century, and arose because of changing attitudes to nature and the natural environment associated with the Romantic movement. In earlier times walking generally indicated poverty and was also associated with vagrancy.Thomas West, an English priest, popularised the idea of walking for pleasure in his guide to the Lake District of 1778. In the introduction he wrote that he aimed
to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations.
To this end he included various "stations" or viewpoints around the lakes, from which tourists would be encouraged to appreciate the views for their aesthetic qualities and natural beauty. West's guide was a major success upon its publication.
File:Claife Station.jpg|right|thumb|Claife Station, built at one of Thomas West's "viewing stations", to allow visiting tourists and artists to better appreciate the picturesque Lake District
Another famous early exponent of walking for pleasure was the English poet William Wordsworth. In 1790 he embarked on an extended tour of France, Switzerland and Germany, a journey he subsequently recorded in his lengthy autobiographical poem The Prelude. His famous poem Tintern Abbey was inspired by a visit to the Wye Valley made during a walking tour of Wales in 1798 with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. Wordsworth's friend the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was another keen walker and in the autumn of 1799, he and Wordsworth undertook a three weeks tour of the Lake District. John Keats, who belonged to the next generation of Romantic poets began, in June 1818, a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with his friend Charles Armitage Brown.
More and more people undertook walking tours through the 19th century, of which the most famous is probably Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through the Cévennes in France with a donkey, recorded in his Travels with a Donkey. Stevenson also published in 1876 his famous essay "Walking Tours". The subgenre of travel writing produced many classics in the subsequent 20th century. An early American example of a book that describes an extended walking tour is the naturalist John Muir's A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, a posthumous published account of a long botanising walk, undertaken in 1867.
Due to industrialisation in England, people began to migrate to the cities, where living standards were often cramped and unsanitary. They would escape the confines of the city by rambling about in the countryside. However, the land in England, particularly around the urban areas of Manchester and Sheffield, was privately owned and trespass was illegal. Rambling clubs soon sprang up in Northern England and began politically campaigning for the legal 'right to roam'. One of the first such clubs was the 'Sunday Tramps', founded by Sir Frederick Pollock, George Croom Robertson and Leslie Stephen in 1879. The first national grouping, the Federation of Rambling Clubs, was formed in London in 1905 and was heavily patronised by the peerage.
Political activism and walking in inter-war Britain
In the 1930s walking reached new levels of popularity as a pastime: on any weekend some ten thousand ramblers could be expected on the moors of the Peak District, while in the country at large there were over half a million ramblers. A convergence of economic factors played their part in this boom in numbers: the 1920s saw a steady reduction in the working hours of the British worker as well as a rise in real wages and a decreasing cost of travel. In the early 1930s a rise in unemployment led to more leisure time, leading to a surge in walking known as a "hiking craze". There was also a high level of media coverage which, according to Ann Holt, was comparable to modern media hype. Frank Trentmann has suggested that the surge in walkers made it "the numerically strongest part of the new romanticism in interwar Britain".With these increasing numbers came increasingly strong demands for walkers rights. Access to Mountains bills, that would have legislated the public's right to roam across some private land, were periodically presented to Parliament from 1884 to 1932 without success. Mass rallies and trespasses were held in support of this cause, including an annual access to mountains demonstration at Winnats Pass and, most famously, a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. However, the Mountain Access Bill that was passed in 1939 was opposed by many walkers, including the organisation The Ramblers, who felt that it did not sufficiently protect their rights, and it was eventually repealed.
Following the end of the Second World War the effort to improve access led to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, and in 1951 to the creation of the first national park in Britain, the Peak District National Park. The establishment of this and similar national parks helped to improve access for all outdoors enthusiasts. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 considerably extended the right to roam in England and Wales.
Walking tour
A walking tour is an extended walk in the countryside, undertaken by an individual or group and lasting several days. Walking tours have their origin in the Romantic movement of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It has some similarities with backpacking, trekking and also tramping in New Zealand, though it need not take place in remote places. In the late-20th century, with the proliferation of official and unofficial long-distance walking routes, some walkers now are more likely to follow a designated long-distance route than to plan their own route. Walking tours are also organised by commercial companies, and can have a professional guide, or are self-guided; in these commercially organised tours, luggage is often transported between accommodation stops.Access to the countryside
England and Wales
Rights of way
In England and Wales the public have a legally protected right to "pass and repass" on footpaths, bridleways and other routes which have the status of a public right of way. Footpaths typically pass over private land, but if they are public rights of way they are public highways with the same protection in law as other highways, such as trunk roads. Public rights of way originated in common law, but are now regulated by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. These rights have occasionally resulted in conflicts between walkers, landowners and local authorities. The rights and obligations of farmers who cultivate crops in fields crossed by public footpaths are now specified in the law. Walkers can also use permissive paths, where the public do not have a legal right to walk, but where the landowner has granted them permission to do so.Rights of way in London
s of public rights of way have been compiled for all of England and Wales as a result of Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, except the 12 Inner London boroughs which, along with the City of London, were not covered by the Act.To protect the existing rights of way in London the Ramblers launched their "Putting London on the Map" in 2010 with the aim of getting "the same legal protection for paths in the capital as already exists for footpaths elsewhere in England and Wales. Currently, legislation allows the Inner London boroughs to choose to produce definitive maps if they wish, but none do so".
Right to roam
Walkers long campaigned for the right to roam, or access privately owned uncultivated land. In 1932 the mass trespass of Kinder Scout had a far-reaching impact. The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 created the concept of designated Open Country, where access agreements were negotiated with landowners. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 gave walkers a conditional right to access most areas of uncultivated land.Scotland
Right to roam
In Scotland there is a traditional presumption of universal access to land. This was formally codified into Scots law under the Land Reform Act 2003, which grants everyone the right to be on most land and inland water for recreation, education, and going from place to place, providing they act responsibly. The basis of access rights in Scotland is one of shared responsibilities, in that those exercising such rights have to act responsibly, whilst landowners and managers have a reciprocal responsibility to respect the interests of those who exercise their rights. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code provides detailed guidance on these responsibilities.Responsible access can be enjoyed over the majority of land in Scotland, including all uncultivated land such as hills, mountains, moorland, woods and forests. Access rights also apply to fields in which crops have not been sown or in which there are farm animals grazing; where crops are growing or have been sown access rights are restricted to the margins of those fields. Access rights do not apply to land on which there is a building, plant or machinery. Where that building is a house or other dwelling the land surrounding it is also excluded in order to provide reasonable measures of privacy. The issue of how much land surrounding a building is required to provide "reasonable measures of privacy" has been the main issue on which the courts have been asked to intervene. In Gloag v. Perth and Kinross Council the sheriff allowed about surrounding Kinfauns Castle, a property belonging to Ann Gloag, to be excluded from access rights. In Snowie v Stirling Council and the Ramblers' Association the courts allowed about to be excluded, but refused permission for a wider area to be excluded and required the landowner to keep the driveway unlocked to allow access.