'The great affair is to move: to come down off this featherbed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot, ' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. This book celebrates the history of walking for leisure and pleasure.

There's no shortage of the famous, and the not so famous, exponents of a good, long walk: Dr. Johnson and his faithful Boswell on their Hebridean jaunt; John Taylor, whose Penniless Pilgrimage, a record of his 1618 journey from London to Edinburgh, provided the first account of a walking tour; and Samuel Coleridge who conceived his epic tale of the Ancient Mariner on a ramble through Devon. The author also includes the stories of key inventions: the cagoule, the Thermos flask, the rucksack, Gore-Tex and the walking pole.

Fully illustrated throughout, A Ramble Through the History of Walking tells the engaging history of one of man's favorite pastimes.