Go for a walk to free your mind

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1:22way fair every style every home teens share everything that may include the bacteria that can cause meningococcal disease known as meningitis even if your teen's been vaccinated in the past they could still be missing meningitis vaccinations ask your teen's doctor or visit meningitis.com today sponsored by gsk walking is an underrated superpower which for millennia has unlocked our human creativity and allowed people to free their minds so that's what we should find time to do today according to Nicholas Crane who I'm delighted to chat to in this episode of Life Lessons from History from History Extra.

2:00My name's Dave Musgrove and the concept of this podcast is simple. I find great historians and archaeologists and ask them to propose a lesson from history that might help us live happier, healthier, better or more productive lives today and then we chat about it. It's the history well-being crossover that you didn't know you needed, but hopefully you might enjoy. My guest today is Nicholas Crane, author, geographer, Walker, whose latest book is The Path More Travelled, The Secret History of Britain's Footpaths, described by none other than Michael Palin as absorbing and exhilarating. So that's quite an accolade.

2:39You must have been pleased about that. I was thrilled a bit. I'm a great fan of michael and actually you know when you write a non-fiction book you have in mind people who have made a difference to your lives uh life in the past and uh michael's open attitude to travel has always been something that i've i've stood by you know travel with an open mind be ready to have your mind changed and listen to people you meet yeah yeah no he's a he's a great man isn't he have you ever met him i have yes he was president of the royal geographical society before I was, which he was a very difficult act to follow.

3:12He was outstanding. So I was rather looked up to him as well as having been, obviously, I'm of that vintage that Monty Python's Flying Circus was, you know, compulsory viewing back when I was a student. Okay. So the lesson we're going to examine today is go for a walk to free your mind. We should just talk about the book briefly. What are you trying to do in the book before we get into the lesson. I'm telling the 12 ,000 year story of the evolution of Britain's footpaths from prehistoric routeways when there were just a few thousand people in Britain emerging from the ice through to modern city pavements where we have literally millions of people milling around a capital city like London pushed to the verges by motor traffic.

3:56So it's a kind of big epic story. and the reason I wanted to do it is that I wanted to show how resilient and critical to our future as a society is the idea of a network of footpaths. You know, we think of the internet as being something we can't do without these days but the internet is obviously digital, it's virtual, it doesn't kind of physically exist. But the thing that preceded the internet was what I think of as the internet of feet, this network of footpaths on the ground. that instead of the digital internet, the internet of feet has enormous physical and mental qualities for health.

4:31And footpaths connect communities one to the next. They allow communities to interact within themselves. They teach us the story of our own landscape. And they also are a space for meditation. I'm not alone in using footpaths as a place to escape from my desk or from get out of the house for a while. to open the mind. I find that whenever I'm stuck on something, I just open the door and go for a walk. And as an ex-London, I spent 40 years living in central London. It doesn't matter whether it's a city pavement or whether it's a country footpath. The process of putting one foot in front of the other opens your mind.

5:10It relieves tension and pressure and it allows you to kind of think laterally, to see things in a very different way. And I found it both mentally and physically incredibly helpful. It's effortless too. It's not like going to the gym where you've got to buy a membership and then kind of plong yourself on a machine and work at it. You're just going for a wander. You know, sometimes I go out without knowing where I'm going. I'll decide where I'm going after I've set off. The point is just to be moved, put one foot in front of the other, which is itself a hypnotic process, putting one foot in front of the other.

5:42And before you know where you are, you're thinking thoughts that wouldn't happen indoors. Yeah, you speak the truth there. Absolutely. And kind of like we know intrinsically that going for a walk is a good thing for us, I think, don't we? It kind of clears our mind, allows new thoughts in, as you just said. But I suppose what I want to know is how far this is a genuine aspect of the human condition, something that people have always found in the past. How far can we take this story back, do you think? That's such an interesting question. Are we hardwired to appreciate paths? And I'm absolutely certain that we are.

6:14How old is Hermann Sapin, 300 ,000 years, 400 ,000 years old or something? Yeah, about that. But we've only been living continuously on the place we call Britain for 12 ,000 years, because before 12 ,000 years ago, Britain was covered in ice. Rannick Moor had a 400-meter thick ice cap on it. It was far too cold for human habitation. So 12 ,000 years ago, relatively recently in terms of human evolution, people walked across Doggerland from the continent, the land bridge between East Anglia and northern Germany and the Netherlands, and started colonizing Britain. and we've been here continuously for those 12 ,000 years.

6:49So we're talking about quite late developed Homo sapiens. And my understanding of all the archaeological reports I've read when I've been putting this 12 ,000 year story together is that we have to have had a really deep understanding of our place in nature right at the beginning of Britain's story 12 ,000 years ago. We weren't using footpaths because if you read enough archaeological reports, you kind of come to the eventual conclusion and some archaeologists have put numbers on it, that there may only have been as few as 10 ,000 people in Britain during the early Mesolithic, the beginning of this 12 ,000-year story.

7:25Perhaps tens of thousands, but no more than that. But so far too few to create anything that we'd recognize today as a footpath. And the general consensus seems to have been that we moved along broad corridors, or broad corridors of movement, instead of footpaths, we had these broad corridors through the landscape, that we moved along and without using footpaths, we would have had to find our way using landmarks that had been memorized and then passed down through the generations. So if it was a repeat route that our ancestors had used 10 years earlier, perhaps through storytelling, oral storytelling, we'd have been told that you walked up the, walked down to the River Thames until you saw a flat watershed, maybe with pools of water on it, and then you walked onwards towards the setting sun and that would take you down to headwaters of the River Avon and that would eventually lead towards the Bristol Channel and the other coast of Britain.

8:16And in modern terms, that's only kind of three or four days walk between the Thames and the Avon. And one of the things I've learned over many years of walking is that, to answer your question about are we hardwired to use routeways, as I have called them, and archaeologists have called these pre-footpath routes. I once walked across Europe from one side of the continent to the other, following the mountain watershed from Spain to Turkey. and it took me a year and a half. This is before the age of GPS and mobile phones and stuff. So I navigated using a compass. I didn't have a tent. I didn't have a torch.

8:49I slept in caves and forests. And so because it was a year and a half, I walked through six or seven consecutive seasons, including midwinter when I walked the Alps from end to end on snowshoes. So I experienced what it would have been like as the ice was melting in Britain because I spent three months in the Alps on snowshoes, camping in often minus 20, minus 30. really really extreme difficult conditions but absolutely not impossible so i walked for about 7 000 miles on my own unsupported i didn't ever come back to britain once i set off it was a completely solitary continuous exercise and you know when i got to istanbul i was really agonizing about whether to continue and walk across asia too there was no sense i was tired or fed up or uh i mean i had to come i just got married before i set off so there was a kind of very big reason for coming back to London.

9:42You got married and then you set off on a 18-month walking holiday. Yeah, I'm ashamed to say that is what happened. I didn't know it was going to take a year and a half. I said to Annabelle, my wife, she asked how long it would take. I said, well, maybe a year, but I didn't know because I'd never done a walk before. So it was a guess. I got a bit wrong. Like a lot of things in life. So you're basically Mesolithic in outlook then, isn't it if you've if you've kind of done this for it you must understand this idea of route breaking yeah i do you know i no one's ever said that to me but actually yes i think i i get it i really one of the things one of many things i detected while i was making this journey solitary journey was that without an electric torch was that after three or four months walking and i was initially walking along the sears of northern spain and the pyrenees end to end those were the first two big mountain ranges.

10:31And after a few months, sleeping outdoors, invariably under the open sky, high in the mountains, I got my bodily rhythms adjusted to the phases of the moon. And so as the moon filled, I would just accumulate energy that was almost impossible to suppress until on the night of a full moon, more than once, I just walked all night. So I'd have walked all day, the full moon, like a light bulb above my head. And it would just, I wouldn't, there's no chance of going to sleep. I'd just walk all night. And then all the next day as well. I remember one episode in Spain where I think I did something like 75 kilometers straight through over mountain ranges.

11:11And as it happened, one of those mountain ranges that night was limestone. And I've subsequently done a lot of walking at night on Britain's chalk landscapes. So if you're on limestone or chalk which is a kind of a limestone they reflect moonlight so there is no trouble at all walking at night when you're on limestone or chalk you can see you know you're not going to trip over if you're used to it and of course your night vision if you after a few months you really can see even when there's no moon and you're just walking or moving look around wave chosen to unroll your sleeping bag the ambient starlight's sufficient to see and the The other thing is I never once really felt threatened by anything that nature could throw at me.

11:57There were a couple of episodes of people with guns. That's rather different. But in terms of storms, electrical storms, I had a couple of kind of really exciting nights where ball lightning bounced around me when I was lying on the ground in my sodden sleeping bag. I was thinking this is a bit of a lottery, will it not? And even then I was thinking actually this is a lottery. Either it's going to hit me or it's not. There's nowhere I can go to. I'm 2 ,000 meters out the mountainside and either it's going to hit me or not. And I remember one night in the Pyrenees during a massive electrical storm, I saw the ball lightning kind of bouncing through the trees, not very far from where I was lying, hit a tree which just exploded, landed on the ground.

12:39And in the morning I went to look at the tree and it's astonishing. You could see these veins of charred roots on the forest floor and the smell of kind of melted sap, you know, fried sap was heavy in the air. And that would have been a Mesolithic experience, you know. And what I learned the hard way, but it actually seemed quite natural, was I just adapted really quickly to being out there in the forests and mountains. It was not a problem. So, you know, you learn what sort of caves are going to be comfortable. You know, you need a level trodden floor. You might find a cave with a great roof, but if it's sloping with a rocky floor, it's going to be really painful to sleep in.

13:18Some trees are better than others for providing shelter at night, and you have to think of electrical storms because you don't want to be sleeping under a tree during an electrical storm. In terms of luxury, and actually most nights were luxurious, there's nothing better than finding a ridge that trends north-south so that you go to bed with the setting sun and you wait with the rising sun. That is really a delicious sensation. I always slept really heavily under the stars I fear that this life lesson might be coming a bit extreme for some of our listeners thinking that we're proposing they go and walk across Europe and sleep in caves which is not quite where we're going to with this but that is a fantastic adventure and I'm going to pick up on one thing actually I do a bit of running I like running and I ran along the ridgeway a nice chalk path that we were talking about and I slept rough one night and then I got up early and ran along it and definitely I agree you can see the white chalky line, but I did fall over.

14:17Just because I'm clumsy, I think. But look, let's sort of move this on a bit and just think about, try and understand this question, this basic question I'm asking a bit more deeply and moving forward in time. How far people through history were able to sort of use walking as a means to free their mind? What examples have we got of people sort of actively trying to do that sort of thing? Because today we have the luxury of walking for pleasure. That wasn't the case in the past. So help us into that area. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think if you look at the 12 ,000 year period in the book, of those 12 ,000 years, the first 6 ,000 years, we were hunting and gathering.

14:58So we've been hunter-gatherers, collectors of wild foods on our landscape for far longer than is often acknowledged. And out of those 12 ,000 years, so half of them were hunting and gathering. but only the last 2 ,000 years since the Romans arrived have we had written records what we are unable to do is tap into recollections memoirs travelogues any more any further back than 2 ,000 years ago so we don't know what people have they what they thought what they felt my strong instinct having done a lot of long walks is that during those 6 ,000 years of hunting gathering collecting I've called it the age of roaming in the book.

15:40I suspect that we instinctively wanted to move on to new places. It's very telling that there have been so many incredible archaeological digs in Scotland, and particularly in inaccessible places like in the Cairngorms, on the River Dee, Headwaters of the Dee, where this fascinating group of Mesolithic hunting sites have been found, and on the islands of the Hebrides, where early on in our occupation, People were taking boats out to Skye, Rum, the Isle of Arran, and then bringing objects from those islands and then depositing them on the mainland and on other islands. So things were being moved around this network of routeways.

16:22And what intrigues me so much, I hope this partly answers your question, is that we only have those inorganic survivors, the stones, the axe heads and so on, that we know were moved on these seaways and prehistoric routeways. But accompanying them must have been ideas. So there's no archaeological record of the ideas that are being moved around Britain at the same time, but they must have been. So clearly people communicated because these objects were being, you know, there's a much later Neolithic axe heads that came from the center of the Lake District. You know, they've ended up on the River Thames, the other end of the country.

17:00So these ideas would have traveled great distances. When Neolithic people came to Britain at the beginning of the era of farming and mining and monument building, it only took 200 years for those ideas to travel up to Scotland and go all the way to Wales. So, you know, ideas traveled really quickly. And we're talking about a switch from hunter gathering to farming. It only took 200 years for the most remote bits of Britain to adopt this new method of survival. And with it came footpaths, actually, because if you're living in the same place all year around looking after fields or building a monument or tending cattle, then you're going to be walking the same routes every day.

17:37So routeways became footpaths simply through retreading them day after day after day, year after year after year. So we get the beginnings of the idea of footpaths. I was just going to say I mean there's a lovely little walk I like to do when I go to Stonehenge you start at Durrington Walls which is like the village where the Stonehenge builders were supposed to thought to have lived and then you can kind of just walk across the downland to Stonehenge and you can kind of it's like a I don't know what three miles or something but you can kind of imagine that must have been a walk that those people were doing you know going from their homes to the Stones and it's just it's quite an evocative feeling I think Do you know what I'd love to do that walk with you sometime Dave because that's of course very very close to this site called blickmead and it's the one place and it's i understand it's quite controversial in archaeological circles but blickmead which is just outside the town on the edge of the town of amesbury very close to this place durrington walls and stonehenge you're talking about was occupied during the mesolithic before stonehenge was built and there's an argument that it's the one place in britain indeed in europe where there's continuity of use of a landscape that bridges the age of roaming the hunter-gatherers with the much later age of farming.

18:49There are some striations in the downland near what was the Stonehenge car park that are oriented towards the, I think it's the midsummer solstice. And the argument goes that these predated, there was an alignment that may have predated the placing of the pits at Stonehenge and then the Henge itself. And also, I mean, the thing that intrigues me as a geographer is that this is also a place that is on one of those through routes that would have been used if you were crossing between the east and west coast of Britain. No, you're absolutely right. It is a bit controversial and some people say it's a bit fanciful, but I like, you know, you've got to have theories about these things, haven't you?

19:29So why not? I want to move us forward in time because we've got a lot to get through in this chat. But if we take as read that kind of like it is inbuilt in human nature to want to roam, how does that manifest in later history? And we've got records when we can know more fully what people were thinking. How does that manifest in people's attitudes to walking? Do we see people in the Middle Ages or later actually sort of using walking as a way to generate ideas? Yeah, we do. And it's immensely exciting. And one of the great pleasures of writing a book like this is digging in libraries for accounts that people might not be familiar with.

20:06One of the travelogues that, in fact, for me, this is a travelogue that sets in train the idea of long foot journeys that are voyages of personal discovery and enlightenment. And the man who got this going for me was Gerald of Wales, who in 1188 was conscripted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make a journey around the border of Wales, a complete circumnavigation of Wales on horseback and on foot to recruit archers for the Third Crusade. What Gerald did was clearly he kept some kind of journal or diary which hasn't survived. But what he did do was write an account of this journey around Wales.

20:44He wrote a tandem account, which is the first ever geographical description of Wales. And for me, Gerald is the kind of the medieval Michael Palin. And it's still in Penguin as a paperback book. And it's a wonderful account of a 12th century educated cleric traveling in the company of quite a large retinue. So he's got the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's kind of way out of his depth. Englishman never been to Wales before, but there would have been a... So the archbishop would have had his own retinue. They would have been traveling with some kind of security details. So we have to imagine a group of maybe 10, 20, I kind of doubt it was more than 20 horsemen together with local guides because there were no maps.

21:29So they know where they're trying to go. They're trying to go around the outside of Wales and they're trying to spend every night in somewhere safe, like an Anglo-Norman castle or a monastery. But in between those places, They're open to attack by the Welsh Welsh in the centre of Wales. They're not particularly keen on Anglo-Normans. And of course, they've got the weather and the difficulties of route finding. So Gerald's horse in Neath outside what's now the Port Talbot steel plant gets stuck in quicksand, for example. His baggage, his books are damaged. He nearly loses the horse. During the journey, subsequently, two people are murdered on the road.

22:05but they do manage to complete the whole journey go right way around the outside of Wales and Gerald is he's kind of he's got a quirky eye he loves describing both the landscape but also the local traditions so he's having conversations with local people and recording their the myths and legends that they are living by so this is before the age of writing most people living in the villages and the castles can't read or write so it is all about oral storytelling subsequent to Gerald there's a whole cavalcade of erudite scholars making journeys on horseback or foot through Britain. One of my favourites is Celia Fiennes who in 1698 made this huge figure of eight horseback journey through the whole of England right the way up the Scottish border all the way west to Land's End and I've written about her quite a lot in different books so I'm rather fascinated by Celia.

22:59She didn't mean ever to be published. A very modest woman unlike her compatriot Daniel or Defoe, who was an egocentric male, whose book, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, is part fabricated. Celia just wrote for her friends and family as a private journal. And she made this huge figure of a journey. And I wondered what she'd been up to, because when you look at a map, it's a very long, complicated route that has no geographical logic to it. And then I went back through all her earlier journeys she'd recorded. Then I went back to a library because there's a record of what book she owned.

23:31And she owned two copies of Camden's Britannia, which is like a lonely planet guide to England, county by county description. And basically, she'd been ticking off all the counties in Camden's Britannia to make sure she could visit every single English county. So this great figure of eight in 1698, she was knocking off the final 13 counties. So she left behind a record of being the first person, first person ever to have visited every English county. Other people must have done it beforehand, but this is the first recorded account by Celia Fiennes in 1698. So she's a great hero because, of course, by visiting every English county, you get a means of comparison.

24:10She loved beer. She loved engineering. She was fearless. A couple of times she was unhorsed dangerously. She was held up by highwaymen who she just brushed aside. A remarkable woman. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema.

24:50So I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about EBCLIS? EbGliss Lubrikizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies, EbGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to EbGliss.

25:22Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EPCLIS. Before starting EPCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EPCLIS and visit EPCLIS.com or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. This episode is brought to you by DeeDee's Discounts. Back to School Season is officially here and Didi's has everything on your list. I'm talking bold styles, cool kicks, backpacks, and even dorm room essentials.

25:59All the prices that won't hurt your wallet. So don't sleep on Didi's. Whether you've got a second grader or a sophomore, Didi's has your whole family covered. Find a Didi's discount store near you and go check it out today. If we have time afterwards, maybe I'll buy you lunch. I'll tell you about a man called Bob Carlisle who was the first man to push a wheelbarrow from Land's Ends to John O 'Groats and back in the 19th century because I think I think he'll enjoy him and listeners podcast history podcast series all about Bob Carlisle if you want to listen to that but we're not in this lesson we're not suggesting that people need to go on massive long distance walks to benefit from walking are we let's localize this a bit let's let's try and give give people a sense about how they might benefit from going for a walk and think about the historical precedence on on sort of shorter basis.

26:45So can you drop us into something in that area? Yes. I mean, I don't mean to make everything sound epic, but the point of this book is what I've called a right to roots, that every single community in Britain has roots within it. So if it's a town or a city, we have pavement roots. And actually in cities, you have a thing that's almost like a right to roam because there are so many streets, alleys, back roads, and walkways, canal towpaths, riverbanks that you can almost navigate using a compass and say, I want to head north. It doesn't matter whether you take one street or another, it's still going to get you where you want to go.