If you like books about travel (especially about walking) and you haven't read "The Old Ways" by Robert Macfarlene, then I would strongly recommend it. It's a really interesting book which I finished almost in one sitting.
I haven't read any of Robert Macfarlene's books before and came at it with some serious misconceptions. I was expecting a book about pathways - the sort of pathways I trudged along for 5,000 kilometres across Europe. I had been fascinated by our universal walking heritage and the fact that walking 20-40k a day, often carrying huge loads, was something most people did for centuries if not millenia, but which has now largely disappeared in the "west" at least as, over the last 100 years or so, the countryside emptied. There might be a book to be written about the end of "economic" walking - the transformational replacement of people and animals as "beasts of burden" - but I suspect it wouldn't be as interesting or as much fun as "The Old Ways".
I haven't read any of Robert Macfarlene's books before and came at it with some serious misconceptions. I was expecting a book about pathways - the sort of pathways I trudged along for 5,000 kilometres across Europe. I had been fascinated by our universal walking heritage and the fact that walking 20-40k a day, often carrying huge loads, was something most people did for centuries if not millenia, but which has now largely disappeared in the "west" at least as, over the last 100 years or so, the countryside emptied. There might be a book to be written about the end of "economic" walking - the transformational replacement of people and animals as "beasts of burden" - but I suspect it wouldn't be as interesting or as much fun as "The Old Ways".
