I have always had a healthy collection of walk-guides, but the pandemic has seen me buy quite a few more, allowing me to undertake armchair walking and (I hope) forward planning. Just as one never sets out to cook every recipe in a cookbook, there will be paths in these books which I shall never tread. I hope that I can help readers decide which books they might enjoy, from my more recent purchases.
But first, Books for Boots. The title has been with me for over thirty years. During the latter part of the 1980s, a (sad to report, now late) colleague and I were asked to devise an extra-mural class for our institution’s foray into “university for the community”; we decided on a course called The Art, Craft and Science of Walking. Each week, a different theme, ranging from geomorphology to place-name analysis, conservation to literature, and this last we called Books for Boots. It was one of my favourite classes, and I think it was John’s overall favourite — an anthology of walking in fiction and non-fiction. Jeanie Deans walked out of Heart of Midlothian, as did David Balfour out of Kidnapped, and Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s hero of the book of that name. On the non-fiction side, there was Patrick Leigh Fermor, WH Murray, and Hamish Brown (yes, we had two Scots running the course). We always finished with the band of explorers setting out on their journey to the pole — Christopher Robin, Piglet, Pooh and the rest. I had to resurrect the title in John’s memory, though it serves a different purpose today.
Where there is a comparative review of books on a particular route (such as the GR34), the individual books’ details will be given on the review page.
The choice of reviewed titles may seem fairly random (as befits a statistical writer), but once a corpus emerges, some structure may develop. Let us wait and see.
- Offshore Europe
- Coast to Coast Walk
- London Tree Walks — Paul Wood (Safe Haven Books)
- Walking in Essex — Peter Aylmer (Cicerone)
- Walking the Wicklow Way — Paddy Dillon (Cicerone)
- Walks for each Season — Julia Smith (Corncockle Publishing)
- Mainland Europe
- GR34 — Sentier des Douaniers
- Hanzestedenpad: along the valley of the IJssel (Wandelnet)
- Westweg
Disclaimer and advisory notices
Note that lwalks.london can accept no responsibility for content on an external site or in an external publication, nor for any action by an external site which renders our content or link outdated or unworkable. Furthermore, lwalks.london retains the liberty to unlink external content at any time if the content loses relevance to the linking page(s).
Images used on the lwalks.london site are either owned by lwalks.london, or are subject to a licence-to-use held by lwalks.london. These images must not be further used by any third party without the explicit permission of lwalks.london, or of the original image licensor. A small number of images are in the public domain.
Routes are to be followed entirely at the walker’s own risk: lwalks.london can take no responsibility for any inconvenience, damage, loss or injury caused by attempting to follow a route, which is no more than a mere suggestion of a possible enterprise.
We should be happy to learn of any changes to the line of a walk and/or its attendant facilities, or to consider an image which you own for inclusion on the site, lwalks.london thus being granted a free and non-exclusive licence to use the image anywhere on its site. Please contact us.
Lwalks.London 