The Lost Art of Walking

3. Eccentrics, Obsessives, Artists

Looked at a certain way, walking is the most ordinary, natural, ubiquitous activity. What could be more commonplace or lacking in eccentricity than the act of walking? And yet we live in a world where plenty of people find the idea of walking for pleasure, much less for philosophical, aesthetic, or deeply personal reasons, to be not just odd but downright incomprehensible.

In 2005 when Steve Vaught, a four-hundred-pound ex-marine, began his walk across America, from San Diego to New York, the media tended to treat him as a weight-loss enthusiastic. He did the walk, and he did lose weight, just over a hundred pounds in thirteen months, and he did get to appear on Oprah. But his weight loss wasn’t enough for some, and you could see their point: at three hundred pounds he wasn’t the very best advertisement for walking as a weight-loss strategy. Vaught insisted that weight loss was only part of the story. He was also walking ‘to regain his life’, he said, and by his own account he has. ‘I no longer manage business or pursue money beyond what I need’, he says. ‘I’ve given away all my material things and live life out of two or three carry bags, and I recommend it highly’.

Weight loss, at least, was identified as a ‘good reason’ for walking, if not exactly natural. Walking naked, however natural in one sense, is still regarded as deeply odd. The most famous naked walker of recent years is the Englishman Steve Gough. He describes himself as ‘body positive’ and claims that his extensive experience of walking naked in the world has given him a ‘connectedness’ with others. He has now twice walked naked from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, a traditional walking route, the longest distance between two points on the British mainland. He has spent a lot of time in court, and a certain amount of time in jail.

The British media only got interested in it when he did the Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s walk for the second time and took his naked girlfriend, Melanie Roberts, with him. He also had a film crew with him. Cynics might think that without the naked girlfriend there might not have been a film crew.

The resulting documentary, made by Richard Macer, shows the British public’s surprisingly extreme reactions to the naked pair, both positive and negative. Gough encounters a number of people who regard him as a harmless, likable, even admirable eccentric, part of a great British tradition, which is surely the only sensible way to regard him. This includes a group of women he encounters in a pub in Derbyshire who strip down to their underwear in a show of solidarity. By contrast, a working-class mother is shown seething with rage and disgust, afraid that the sight of a naked man and woman will have some hideously damaging effect on her innocent children. Her reaction is alarmingly, frighteningly extreme.

I wonder what the modern media might have made of the Old Leatherman, a nineteenth-century tramp who for just over thirty years, from 1858 to 1889, was in constant motion, dressed head to foot in leather, walking a three-hundred-mile circuit around parts of Connecticut and New York State. The route took him precisely thirty-four days: you could set your watch by him. In those three decades of walking he wasn’t heard to utter a single intelligible word.

In fact, the media of the time did give the Old Leatherman a certain amount of attention. He was regularly photographed, and his image appeared on commercially available postcards. He was also invited to display himself in a New York City freak show, an opportunity he wisely declined. His reputation as an eccentric walker surely could not have survived long periods as a sedentary museum exhibit.

As for who the Leatherman was and why he walked, the best story we have, and best doesn’t mean truest, is that he began life as Jules Bourglay (spellings differ) in Lyons, France. He was a young woodcarver, who fell in love above his station with the daughter of a wealthy leather merchant, surname Laron.

Bourglay asked for the girl’s hand in marriage and Laron pere didn’t say yes, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. He gave Bourglay a job in his leather business. If the young man proved himself in the course of the first year, he’d keep him on and approve the marriage.

The move was a disaster. The leather business was in trouble, and Bourglay made some bad decisions, buying leather at high prices just as the market value was going down. The decisions were so bad that Laron went bankrupt and lost his business. The wedding, understandably, was off. Devastated, Bourglay spent a year in a French monastery, then made his way to America, where he tried to expiate his guilt by walking.

That sounds thoroughly eccentric to me, and of course it may be untrue, but even as a myth from a different age it’s interesting that the story was thought of as a reasonable explanation for why a man might walk regular three-hundred-mile circuits while dressed in full leather. Perhaps once eccentricity is understood it is no longer considered eccentric at all. So what is it that defines a walk and a walker as eccentric?

♦

I once worked for a security company that provided guards for many of London’s major art institutions, including the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and the Tate Gallery. My job was simple enough, to protect works of art from the public, and a basic level of vigilance was all that was required of me. But I did have to stay literally on my feet, and metaphorically on my toes, and so whole days, and eventually weeks and months, were spent pacing up and down one gallery or another trying to remain alert, looking at art, keeping an eye on the potentially troublesome public. Sometimes I fantasized about where my endless pacing might have taken me had I actually been going somewhere. But, of course, I wasn’t being paid to go anywhere: I was being paid to walk back and forth.

Some of my colleagues in the museums and galleries complained about the boredom and the pain in their feet, but I never found this a problem. Long periods of time spent in the presence of a work of art, almost any bona-fide work of art, created rare and wonderful experiences, and that made it all worthwhile.

There was a moment in the Royal Academy, before it opened for the day, when I found myself alone in a gallery surrounded by thirty or so priceless Van Goghs, part of an exhibition on Post-Impressionism. As I walked up and down, waiting for the public to be let in, it was easy to entertain other fantasies: that the Van Goghs belonged to me, that I was some sort of James Bond villain who’d secreted these treasures, that I was walking in my own marble hall, a secret lair that was mine and mine alone and no others would ever be allowed to walk there. Then the doors opened and hundreds of art lovers wandered in.

It was easier to sustain the fantasy in a basement gallery at the Tate, where few people came, and where I was guarding a sculpture by Richard Long called Slate Circle. It consisted of 214 rough, largish, unworked pieces of Welsh slate, arranged on the floor in a precise circle about twenty feet in diameter. Guarding it wasn’t much of a challenge. It was unlikely that anyone was going to slip a large lump of Welsh slate under their coat. Few visitors came to that particular room, and when they did, they had a tendency to ask, ‘Is this the bricks?’ meaning Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, made from, and consisting of, 120 firebricks, which to this day remains an exciting touchstone for art skeptics and philistines everywhere. I was delighted to be able to say, ‘No, it’s not the bricks. It’s the stones’.

Long’s Slate Circle explores a tension between art and nature, the indoors and the outdoors, between the created and the found object, between the making of art and the claiming of what’s there. It was undoubtedly a sculpture, but the slate had not been ‘sculpted’ in any conventional sense — it had simply been arranged. Two hundred fourteen lumps of slate had been extracted from the ground and carefully, artfully placed on the floor in the warm glow of an art gallery, where I could see and walk around them. They made my days of pacing very happy.

There were certain ironies in the artwork that I only became aware of later. The slate, I discovered, came from a quarry that Richard Long had gone past while walking, ‘From the source of the River Severn to the summit of Snowdon, 60 miles’. That was the description of his walk and also the title of one of his works of art. Long is a sculptor and a conceptual artist, and has said that walking is the real medium of his art.

His first walking piece was made in 1967, a straight line in a field of grass, created by his pacing up and down until the grass was flattened and the line was made visible: one of those works of art that any damn fool could make if the damn fool were a conceptual artist. Later, Long’s works became larger and more ambitious. Sometimes they involved the stamping out of patterns in earth or ash, sometimes the rearrangement of rocks along the way, sometimes ‘painting’ with water in the course of the walk. Long even collected mud from the area where he’d been walking and used it to create works on the walls or floors of art galleries.

Some of his walks have been lengthy and arduous, across the Sierra Nevada, through the Sahara. The works have titles such as Walking a Circle in Mist, A Walking and Running Circle, A Cloudless Walk, A Walk Across Ireland, A Line of 33 Stones, A Walk of 33 Days. He documents the walks with maps, drawings, photographs, texts, or a combination of these things. Some of these works are wonderfully inscrutable, consisting of no more than a few words. Here, in its entirety, is a piece called A FIVE DAY WALK:

FIRST DAY TEN MILES

SECOND DAY TWENTY MILES

THIRD DAY THIRTY MILES

FOURTH DAY FORTY MILES

FIFTH DAY FIFTY MILES

In a 2006 article and interview with Long in Art and Auction, the writer Roger Tatley admits to some skepticism about the ‘provenance of some of Long’s walks’, suggesting that maybe they didn’t really take place and were artistic inventions. He puts this to Long and describes the artist’s response as ‘gracious’.

‘My work’, says Long in the interview, ‘has to work on all levels, for unbelievers as well. It is of course possible that I don’t do any of these walks, and in some ways, if I didn’t, they would have to work on the level of true conceptual art, like Lawrence Weiner’s. He’s a great artist in that his use of language means it doesn’t matter whether the work exists or not. But the difference for me is that while ideas are important, it’s crucial that I do make my art — that these are real walks, real stones, real mud’.

When I walk through wild places, especially in the desert, I often see that people have been there before me and stamped out patterns on the earth or arranged stones or debris into shapes and designs, with greater or lesser degrees of skill and ingenuity, with apparently a greater knowledge of the conventions of art. The best of them look like fake Richard Longs, although of course there’s always the possibility that some of them may be real Richard Longs.

♦

One of Long’s earliest works, created in 1974, was a drawing and text piece called A Thousand Miles, a Thousand Hours. Perhaps Long is invoking Lao-tzu and his remark about the journey of a thousand miles, but if you’re at all familiar with the history of sustained eccentric walking, those words invoke a quite different character: Captain Barclay.

Captain Robert Barclay Allardice (1779–1854) was a Scot, a sportsman, an athlete, a soldier, a fan of horse racing, a gambler, a landowner, and a ‘gentleman’. Sometimes these roles sat uneasily together. For instance, one of the rules of the English class system decreed that as a gentleman he was allowed to ‘spar’ with professional boxers but he wasn’t allowed to ‘box’ against them. As a landowner he had no practical need to make money by performing athletic feats — he could have performed them as a gentleman amateur. However, he had the need to up the stakes and so bet heavily on himself. If he lost the bet, as he sometimes did, it could cost him the best part of a year’s income.

On the other hand, some of Barclay’s most impressive walking wasn’t done in competition or for money. Often it seems to have been done for the sheer hell of it. In 1802, for example, he set off on a journey from his home in Ury to walk to Kirkmichael and back again. He took the low road on the way out, then decided to return by the more difficult highland route, and even so clocked 180 miles in two and a half days. This could possibly be construed as part of a training regimen, but it surely also involved a considerable degree of showing off. Barclay had a reputation, undoubtedly well deserved but buffed by rumor and fantasy, like the story, certainly untrue, that he trained by carrying a load of butter and cheese on his back.

Barclay’s self-promotion paid off. History has remembered him as one of the very greatest walkers, or at least pedestrians. The two words were not quite synonymous in Barclay’s time. To be a pedestrian in the early nineteenth century simply meant that you raced on foot, as opposed to on horseback or in a carriage. ‘Go as you please’ races were popular, sometimes lasting several days, in which competitors were free to walk or run, or indeed hop, skip, and jump and certainly to rest, as and when they saw fit throughout the event. At the end the winner was simply the one who’d gone farthest around a predetermined route.

As a spectator sport, long pedestrian races must have been lacking in all sorts of ways: the competitors weren’t necessarily on the track at the same time, if they were they certainly weren’t likely to be on the same lap, and you might easily turn up to watch the event during a prolonged rest period and see nothing at all. But large crowds did gather at them, and large amounts of money were staked on the outcomes.

Young blades of the Regency period would bet on just about anything, so of course they bet on sporting events. But the rules of many sports were at that time unfixed. Every new contest was therefore an opportunity for invention, variation, and sometimes bizarrely complicated constraints to make the event, and the betting, that much more of a challenge.

Peter Radford, in his book The Celebrated Captain Barclay, recounts some gloriously eccentric pedestrian contests. One was devised by ‘an unnamed Duke’ who wagered a thousand guineas that he could find a man to walk the ten miles from Piccadilly to Hounslow within three hours, taking three steps forward and one step back. He wasn’t wagering on his own ability to do it, but on his ability to find a man who could, though Radford tells us the contest never actually took place.

Barclay first performed as a competitive pedestrian while still at school. At the age of seventeen he wagered that he could walk six miles ‘heel and toe’ (the standard definition of racewalking, with one part of one foot touching the ground at all times) on the Brixton to Croydon road within an hour. He succeeded, and won a hundred guineas, a good payday for anyone and a nice feat for a schoolboy, but not really so very impressive by Barclay’s later standards.

His career as a pedestrian began in earnest in 1801. The bet was that he could cover ninety miles in less than twenty-one and a half hours. The contest took place on the Roman Road at Barmby Moor in Yorkshire, and Barclay went back and forth on a one-mile stretch and completed the distance with over an hour to spare. Radford says:

‘He mostly walked but broke into an easy run each time he came to one of the slightly uphill sections.’

Barclay’s success in that event wasn’t completely unexpected. He’d been training fiercely and had done a trial at the nearby Newborough Priory, where he’d walked a hundred miles within eighteen hours through the toughest conditions. He walked in the rain, in the cold, in the dark, throughout the night. By daybreak he’d created an ankle-deep circular track in the mud. Richard Long would have loved it.

Barclay performed other impressive feats in this period. In 1803 he wagered that he could cover the sixty-four miles from his quarters in Porridge Island (an alleyway near St. Martin’s Church in central London) to Newmarket in Suffolk in twelve hours. He did it in ten, and this again must have been a pedestrian race rather than strictly a walking race, and some running or at least jogging must have been involved. In 1807 he challenged Abraham Wood, one of the best known competitive walkers of the day, to a twenty-four-hour race, the winner simply being the one who’d walked farthest in that time. Out of what can only have been sheer arrogance, Wood gave Barclay a twenty-mile head start, but then got into physical difficulties, resigned after six and a half hours, and subsequently died.

There was no shortage of other well-known pedestrians, such as a Lieutenant Halifax, who walked six hundred miles in twenty days at thirty miles a day, and then two hundred miles in one hundred hours. There was a pedestrian known as ‘Child, the miller of Wandsworth’, who walked forty-five miles in seven hours and fifty-seven minutes. Foster Powell, in 1790, for a bet of ‘20 guineas to 13’, wagered that he could walk from London to York and back in five days and eighteen hours — he did it with one hour and fifty minutes to spare. In 1808, a Mr. Downs walked four hundred miles in ten days, then thirty-five miles a day for twenty successive days.

The combination of speed and endurance was what made a great walker, but Barclay’s greatest challenge and success, the walk that was to make his name forever, involved only the latter. In 1809, Barclay went for the big one, the one that Richard Long’s 1974 art piece alluded to, and wagered that he could walk a mile in each of a thousand successive hours, for a prize of one thousand guineas. The event started on June 1 on Newmarket Heath and, if all went well, was due to end on the afternoon of July 12.

There’s something elegant and elemental about those grand, high, rounded numbers, but paradoxically there’s also something that sounds quite simple and straightforward. An average speed of one mile per hour is insultingly slow, and walking twenty-four miles in a day is not much of a problem for anyone who considers himself a serious walker. Even walking a thousand miles in just less than six weeks is well within the range of the possible. The problem is having to walk just a mile in every single hour. Think about it.

If you go at four miles per hour, that means that in each hour you’re walking for fifteen minutes, and at rest for forty-five. If you join two miles together, the last fifteen minutes of one hour leading straight into the first fifteen of the next, that still only gives you a maximum of an hour and a half’s rest before you have to start walking again. And naturally enough you slow down as the event goes on. The challenge is all about endurance, but over the course of the six weeks it seems to have as much to do with enduring sleep deprivation as it does with being able to walk a vast distance.

Barclay, of course, succeeded. Once per hour every hour for one thousand hours he walked a single mile on a set course in Newmarket, in Suffolk. He actually changed the course partway through the event when he changed his lodgings, on day sixteen, but the rules remained the same. Barclay struggled, he endured, he succeeded. If his stride was a yard long, then he made 1,760,000 strides.

It was, by all accounts, a huge public event. Vast crowds gathered to see Barclay, though most of them must have seen very little, and I imagine many came for the freak-show element rather than to witness a great sporting achievement. To a modern sensibility the sight of a man walking briskly for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time doesn’t sound like rich entertainment, so surely the crowds must have come to see his suffering and agony, perhaps to see him collapse, or even expire like Abraham Wood. Partway through the event the Edinburgh Advertiser gleefully reported, ‘Captain Barclay was pursuing his extraordinary undertaking yesterday, but as he proceeds, the hopes of accomplishing it become ever more feeble’. Perhaps they were disappointed that he succeeded, that he lived. Barclay showed them all. He did the deed, won his money, slept for some, not too many, hours, and then joined his regiment, based outside Deal, and went off to fight Napoleon.

♦

Barclay’s walking expressed something singular and profound about himself and about the human condition, demonstrating what the human body and the human spirit are capable of. His walking was something in the world and of the world, something natural but also something created and willed. Money was part of his motivation, fame and glory, too, but there was surely something inexplicable and irreducible about his obsessive walking, something that remains compelling and admirable, and ultimately mysterious, to this day.

Barclay didn’t do drawings or text pieces or mud sculptures as part of his walk, but he did contribute to a book. Its full title is Pedestrianism, or, an account of the performances of celebrated pedestrians during the last and present century, with a full narrative of Captain Barclay’s public and private matches, and an essay on training, and it’s attributed to Walter Thorn. Barclay appears as the book’s hero rather than its author, but he provided a good deal of inside information about himself and about walking in general. The third person allows the singing of his praises in ways that would have appeared boastful or arrogant if he’d put his own name on it.

Half the book is an anecdotal history of walking, but the main section describes Barclay’s walk, how he looked while he walked, with…

‘…a sort of lounging gait, without apparently making any extraordinary exertion, scarcely raising his feet more than two or three inches above the ground…His style of walking is to bend forward the body, and to throw its weight on the knees………Any person who will try this plan will find, that his pace will be quickened, at the same time he will walk with more ease to himself, and be better able to endure the fatigue of a long journey, than by walking in a posture perfectly erect, which throws too much of the weight of the body on the ancle-joints [sic]’.

It describes his diet: roasted fowl (hot and cold), strong ale, tea, bread and butter, beefsteaks, mutton chops, porter, wine, and ‘such vegetables as were in season’. And above all it describes his difficulties and his pain. ‘The spasmodic affections in his legs were particularly distressing’, we’re told. They started on day twelve in his calves, thighs, and feet, and got worse until he was in ‘great pain’ by day twenty. By day thirty-three ‘he could not rise up without assistance’. On day thirty-four he couldn’t move without crying out. By day thirty-six, says Thorn, he was walking so slowly it significantly reduced the amount of time he had to rest, though this is scarcely borne out by another part of the book.

A section at the end gives ‘box scores’ for Barclay’s walk, the statistics of his times, speeds, totals, averages, and so on. His first mile, for example, was done in a brisk twelve minutes, and although he gradually slowed down, he was still moving along very nicely. On day eighteen he was still averaging under seventeen minutes per mile — on day thirty-six, after he’d covered well over eight hundred miles, he was still averaging only a tad over twenty minutes — and his slowest mile in the whole event was only twenty-five minutes. His thousandth mile was walked in just twenty-two minutes and would have been quicker, but there were so many spectators crowding around and cheering him on, he could barely find room to walk.

♦

About fifty years later an Australian called Allan McKean performed a similar thousand-mile, thousand-hour walk. He completed the feat in late 1858 in Ballarat, in Victoria, then incredibly did it again a few weeks later in Melbourne, ending this second walk in early 1859. The Melbourne Argus reported that ‘he completed his thousandth mile (actually his two thousandth) in fifteen minutes thirty-nine seconds, and appeared to be as little fatigued as when he had accomplished one-half of his allotted distance’.

I’m sure I ought to be doubly impressed by McKean’s feat, and nobody could possibly belittle it, and yet in the end Captain Barclay remains the man that I, and history, have more respect and affection for. To be the first to do something is inevitably going to be a lot more impressive than to be the first to do it twice.

Twenty years later, two women in America did something that I sometimes feel is more impressive still, certainly more difficult, I think. In 1879, in Brooklyn, an Englishwoman named Ada Anderson walked 2,700 quarter miles in 2,700 consecutive quarter hours. Two years later this record was broken by the exotically named Exilda La Chapelle at the Folly Theatre in Chicago, who completed 3,000 quarter miles in 3,000 quarter hours.

Clearly both these women walked considerably shorter distances than Barclay or McKean, but what makes their walks so compelling, and so much more difficult, is the severe reduction in the periods allowed for rest and recovery. These can never have been more than a little over twenty minutes each. The poor women must have been hallucinating by the end. The Washington Post reported that watching La Chapelle’s walk was like watching the Spanish Inquisition. Naturally, there was no shortage of spectators.

Anderson and La Chapelle were members of a small group of professional ‘pedestriennes’. La Chapelle had turned pro at the age of thirteen. For a brief period in the nineteenth century female walking was a serious sport and a serious business. Large crowds turned out to watch, and successful women earned a great deal of money. Even so, it was an activity that had something sleazy and daring about it: pedestriennes weren’t much better than actresses. It was only a passing fad, however. It was superseded in due course by the more exciting, and even more daring, sport of female bicycle riding, and some of the successful female walkers made an easy transition from two feet to two wheels.

In the interests of research, I decided to do an extended one-mile-per-hour walk. It took place in England, in Suffolk, the county where Captain Barclay walked his thousand miles, but instead of Newmarket, I would be walking in the village of Yoxford, where I sometimes go to write. Suffolk has the great advantage of being flat.

My emulation of the captain was never going to be absolute. For one thing, I would be doing my walking on public paths and streets, not along a designated track. There would be no cheering crowds, nobody timing me, nobody wishing me well or ill, nobody providing me with roasted fowl and porter, nobody betting on my success or failure. Perhaps these things would have spurred me on.

Equally, I wouldn’t be walking a thousand miles, but I did want a taste of how it might feel to do even a fraction of what Barclay had done. I decided to start, with infinite modesty, by doing fifteen miles in fifteen hours. I knew I could complete a fifteen-mile walk easily enough. It was spreading those miles out over the day, with all the gaps and the waiting, the stopping and the starting, that I thought would be interesting and difficult. And I was dead right about that.

Walking slightly more slowly than the good captain, at more or less three miles per hour, twenty minutes per mile, doing the miles in pairs at the end and beginning of two consecutive hours, I would create a pattern of walking for forty minutes and resting for eighty. That didn’t seem too arduous. In fact I thought I could use those rest periods to do some writing, make phone calls, read a book, and so on. I was dead wrong about that.

Yoxford is an interesting little village — peaceful, picturesque, population less than seven hundred. There’s a former country house, now a hotel-cum-Malaysian restaurant called Satis House, where Charles Dickens almost certainly stayed, and he used the name Satis House for Miss Havisham’s home in Great Expectations. Since Dickens was a manic walker there’s every reason to believe he walked in the very places that I did.

Yoxford is also where W.G. Sebald begins one of the cosmically melancholy walks in his book The Rings of Saturn. He writes:

‘I set out on foot…along the old Roman road, into the thinly populated countryside…I walked for nearly four hours, and in all that time I saw nothing apart from harvested cornfields stretching away into the distance under a sky heavy with clouds, and dark islands of trees.’

I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about the Roman road starting at Yoxford. There is a good, straight Roman road nearby, but it’s some way to the west of the village. However, the gloom he describes, which seems to be internal as much as external, sounds accurate enough.

A walk around Yoxford, therefore, has its historical and literary pleasures, but when you’re following in Captain Barclay’s footsteps, you’re not very appreciative of such things. I simply set off from the house, walked briskly but aimlessly for a mile, as measured by my GPS, then stopped and went right back. This felt peculiar and arrhythmic, and frankly I was worried about what the neighbors might think.

Fortunately I didn’t see many neighbors — the cold, damp rain and occasional snow flurries kept them indoors. I varied my routes as much as I could: to the station and back, round the cricket pitch and the bowling green, up to the end of the village as far as the closed-down fish-and-chips shop. At one point I found myself at the end of a mile taking shelter under the trees in the local graveyard as the sleet lashed down on me from an ash gray sky, and I heard the sound of a farmer’s shotgun being repeatedly fired in the distance, at least I hoped it was the distance. This felt surprisingly good. There’s nothing like bleak, adverse conditions for raising a walker’s self-esteem.

As it got colder and wetter I walked more quickly, tensed up, head down, shoulders raised, hands shoved into pockets — very much not the Barclay style. Before long I was chilled through and my back was aching, but I carried on.

It soon became apparent that my plan to do something in the nonwalking periods wasn’t going to work. It became impossible to think about anything except the next walk. I also discovered that waiting to walk is far more arduous than walking.

I did my fifteen miles in fifteen hours without any physical difficulty, and with some satisfaction, but the real satisfaction came from conquering the difficulties imposed by the frustrating stop-start pattern that Barclay’s walk had imposed on him, and on me. Walking at a set pace, making sure each mile was completed inside each designated hour, then stopping, then waiting, then getting ready to walk again, required a discipline and an attention to detail that was quite at odds with the way I (or I imagine anybody else) usually walk. In that sense it was some of the hardest walking I’d ever done.

I did another similar walk in midsummer, and it was a little easier than the one done in winter, but not much. There were pleasures, but they weren’t much like the ones that normally go with a good walk, and the fact is, notions of walking pleasure really didn’t mean much to Captain Barclay. For him a walk was all about testing himself, and others, to the limit. He wanted to demonstrate his strength and stamina. He wanted to beat his competitors, and ultimately he had none. This undoubtedly made him a great walker, and an admirable one, but a walker who was sui generis and one that few mortals can imitate.

♦

One thing that helped me to get through my Captain Barclay walks was making a record of my progress. It loosely resembled the one in the book Pedestrianism. I made a table that charted the time I set off for each walk, the time it took me to walk each mile, the speed, the total time spent walking, and the overall average speed. For instance, it took me four hours, thirty-four minutes, and eighteen seconds to walk the fifteen miles, which by my calculation averages 3.34 mph. Filling in this table, seeing the lines and columns gradually fill up, then doing the calculations, was a great source of enjoyment, at least as much as the walk itself.

There’s surely something contradictory, though not unnatural, about the desire to document and memorialize walking. What could be more transitory and ephemeral than a walk? In one sense, the best you might hope for would be to leave some footsteps, and the current environmental wisdom might suggest that footsteps are precisely all you should leave. No doubt there are those who think the ‘interventions’ that Richard Long makes in the landscape as he walks are a sacrilege.

The rest of us take photographs, shoot video, make drawings, write about it, fill in walking logs, and so on, and I’ve spent a certain amount of time wondering whether this is eccentric or not. Maybe all walking is eccentric — maybe none of it is.

♦

One of the most unlikely reasons I can think of for walking is because the president, any president, advocates it. In 1962, John F. Kennedy, recently come to office, discovered an executive order issued by Theodore Roosevelt in 1956, stating that any self-respecting U.S. Marine ought to be able to walk fifty miles in twenty hours with full pack. Kennedy reckoned that his marines should certainly be able to do anything Roosevelt’s marines could do, and asked his marine commandant to check on this. Kennedy also suggested that his White House staff ought to be able to do it, too.

This, evidently, was a joke — some of his staff couldn’t walk any farther than the watercooler. But, as a publicity stunt, a fifty-mile walk was duly set up for White House staffers. Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, did the walk wearing oxfords.

As is the nature with stunts, there were unforeseen consequences. Such was the Kennedy charisma and popularity that fifty-mile walks suddenly became a national craze. A lot of very ordinary, very unfit civilians took it into their heads to walk fifty miles, often in large groups. Boy Scout troops did it. School groups and seniors did it. An eight-year-old girl named Judy Aylwin failed to do it on her first attempt but succeeded in doing it two weeks later, accompanied by her brother.

The administration was understandably alarmed. A lot of money and energy was being put into the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports to improve the nation’s health. It was clear that if people who had never walked seriously in their lives suddenly walked fifty miles the results were likely to be anything but healthful, and so attempts were made to distance the White House from the madness.

Like all crazes, this one, perhaps fortunately, wore off pretty quickly. America returned to its sedentary ways. But not before a man by the name of Jim McNutt, from San Carlos, California, demonstrated that he could do it faster than anybody else, having walked fifty miles in seven hours, fifty minutes. Was he an eccentric?

Was the filmmaker Werner Herzog demonstrating eccentricity in November 1974, when he heard that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and likely to die and said to himself ‘This must not be’, that German cinema couldn’t do without her, and set off on a walk from Munich to Paris in the depths of winter, trudging through ice and snow, sleeping outdoors, experiencing pain in his ankle and in his left thigh ‘around the groin’, journeying ‘in full faith believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’?

It certainly doesn’t sound like a conventional reason for walking, or a conventional way of keeping someone alive, but it worked. Lotte Eisner didn’t die until 1983. Wim Wenders’s 1984 movie Paris, Texas is dedicated to her. So maybe Herzog’s walk wasn’t eccentric at all.

Herzog is also the man who wrote, in a manifesto called the ‘Minnesota Declaration’, that ‘tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue’. He currently lives in the Hollywood Hills, not a million miles from where I do, though we’ve yet to encounter each other while walking.

At much the same time that Herzog was making his journey to Paris, the English traveler and writer Sebastian Snow was walking the length of South America, 8,700 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Panama Canal. It took him nineteen months. Fellow writer and explorer Eric Newby reckons this is one of the longest uninterrupted walks ever accomplished. The explorer Chris Bonington accompanied him for part of the trip and ‘was reduced to wreckage after a few days’.

Snow is one of my favorite walkers. He was an Englishman of the old school, droll, debonair, tough as granite, and an eccentric by any conventional standard. He was an old Etonian who (this is almost too good to be true) had broken his leg while playing football and had thereby avoided being drafted into the army for national service. They were worried about his ability to march.

Perhaps the greatest show of Snow’s resolve and toughness was his ability to turn down lifts from passing motorists, however hard the going got. Often his refusal caused incomprehension, alarm, and sometimes anger in the spurned drivers. In the Peruvian desert a ‘young and very animated’ Peruvian woman stopped her car and began chatting with him, complaining that desert driving is very monotonous.

‘Desert marching is no sinecure’, Snow replied, quick as a flash, but then he didn’t want it to be. ‘By some transcendental process’, he writes:

‘I seemed to take on the characteristics of a Shire (horse), my head lowered, resolute, I just plunked one foot in front of t’other, mentally munching nothingness.’

Snow’s rejections bring to mind John Francis, otherwise known as Planetwalker. In 1971, Francis saw a catastrophic oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and decided that from that moment he’d stop using motorized transport. It caused him certain problems, not least the loss of his job as manager of ‘a struggling avant-garde music group’ called Spectrum of Sight and Sound, but he obviously believed he’d done the right thing, and for the next five years he spread the word. This in itself caused more problems. Certain people said he’d adopted a holier-than-thou attitude and that the way he talked about walking was designed to make them feel bad. So Francis stopped talking. The blurb on his autobiography reads ‘22 years of walking, 17 years of silence’.

This sounds like pretty odd stuff, and Francis was clearly a man who couldn’t operate very successfully in the ‘ordinary’ world. But from his point of view, his actions weren’t eccentric, they were natural and inevitable. He didn’t do them in order to make people think he was a wild and crazy guy — he did them because he wanted to ‘make a difference’.

Sometimes it seems the world is packed with such people. One currently in the process of making life difficult for himself is Arthur Blessit, who is walking round the world carrying a forty-pound cross. When I last checked his website he’d walked 37,352 miles in 307 nations in 38 years. That distance is equivalent to circling the earth one and a half times. Elsewhere on the website there’s a calculation of how far Jesus walked in his lifetime: far enough to circle the globe precisely once.

And who can forget the two American Buddhist monks walking for peace who took a two-year, nine-month pilgrimage from Los Angeles to their home monastery in Ukiah, Oregon, an eight-hundred-mile trip in all, taking three steps forward, then making a full prostration, for the entire length of the journey. Peter Radford’s ‘unnamed Duke’ would have been impressed and hired them on the spot.

Another peace walker was Mildred Norman Ryder, known as Peace Pilgrim. In 1952 she became the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail in one season, and then had a vision: ‘I saw, in my mind’s eye, myself walking along and wearing the garb of my mission…I saw a map of the United States with the large cities marked…as though someone had taken a colored crayon and marked a zigzag line across, coast to coast and border to border, from Los Angeles to New York City. I knew what I was to do. And that was a vision of my first year’s pilgrimage route in 1953!’

The garb of her mission consisted of ‘one pair of slacks and shorts, one blouse and sweater, a lightweight blanket, and two double plastic sheets, into which I sometimes stuffed leaves’. I had expected something more robelike.

Walking for peace may certainly strike you and me as futile and useless, but if a person believes it works, then it’s the most logical and rational thing in the world. To walk for a reason, any reason, however personal or obscure, is surely a mark of rationality. Money, art, self-knowledge, world peace, these are not eccentric motivations for walking — they’re damn good ones, regardless of whether or not they succeed. I find myself coming to the conclusion that perhaps the only truly eccentric walker is the one who walks for no reason whatsoever. However, I’m no longer sure if that’s even possible.