Damien Enright: Great writers took inspiration from walking

As landlords’ enclosures of villages and commonages during England’s industrial revolution drove landless countrymen into the maws of the poet William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills”, a romantic nostalgia for the countryside began to grow.

The world of outdoors was to be cherished. Tours were the thing if you were rich, tours of the Quantock Hills, the Lake District, the Hebrides, tours of the mountains and moorlands at home and elsewhere in Europe.