An Anatomy of the Pedestrian Traveller

Abstract

When the many pedestrian tourists introduced in Chapter 1 thought it proper in their written accounts to justify their mode of travel, their defence was invariably conducted in terms of the more complete freedom of movement permitted to the pedestrian. Adam Walker claims Rousseau’s support for the belief that ‘there is but one way of Travelling more pleasant than riding on horseback, and that is on foot; for then I can turn to the right and to the left’; Joseph Hucks gives the motives for his continuing preference as ‘convenience and independency’; and Mandet de Penhouet identifies the advantage of the foot-traveller over the carriage passenger as lying in a greater freedom to satisfy one’s curiosity along the way.¹ William Bingley, writing at the end of the 1790s, spiritedly restates the case that is now becoming almost formulaic. Pedestrianism, he claims, is the most ‘useful’ mode of travel, ‘if health and strength are not wanting’:

To a naturalist, it is evidently so; since, by this means, he is enabled to examine the country as he goes along; and when he sees occasion, he can also strike out of the road, amongst the mountains or morasses, in a manner completely independent of all those obstacles that inevitably attend the bringing of carriages or horses.²