Across the country: against the grain. Quite literally, to begin with--East Anglia, a low-lying region that was largely bypassed by the Industrial Revolution, remains, for the most part, a land of barley, wheat and sugar beet. To the west is the more elevated landscape of the East Midlands--rolling country with a largely pastoral tradition. Next, the West Midlands, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the place where the ticking clock of the Anthropocene was first set into motion. Then, after the industrial conurbation of Birmingham and the Black Country, the Midlands gives way to the bucolic borderland of the Welsh Marches before, finally, the rain-soaked hills of Wales itself. The route was one thing--the walking of it, another. The conservationist John Muir is often credited with saying, 'Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.' According to the Sierra Club, who are understandably indignant about any misrepresentation of their founder, the great man never said anything remotely like this and it was merely a misattributed T-shirt slogan that somehow managed to gain credence.

Falsely attributed or not, it was nevertheless a dictum that held great appeal. Not only did I want to walk. but I wanted to avoid roads as much as possible and instead follow footpaths, bridleways, farm tracks, green lanes and canal tow-paths, whichever led in roughly the right direction. But footpaths wherever possible: the human imprints of purposeful walking--before the coming of the toll roads, footpaths and lanes barely wide enough for a horse and cart--were the only routes that most country folk ever experienced in their largely geographically constrained lives. Footpaths have a close relationship with human settlement: made for human feet, they were also created and maintained by their movement--between villages, from cottage to church, from village to market town. The repeated footfall of hundreds of years' transit has etched thoroughfares into the landscape that remain in place today: the desire paths of local geography. Every step along an ancient footpath is to make a connection with the past and the people who forged the landscape. Our modern landscape is, after all, as much the result of human impact as it is of colliding continents, the earth-gouging power of ice or the shifting course of rivers.

I was in no great hurry. The walk I had in mind was not intended to be any sort of severe physical challenge, nor did I feel any compulsion to complete it all in one go. It would be less of a route march, more of a slow westwards drift. All I needed was a starting point, so I plumped for the coast closest to where I lived.