Why Walk?

Walk to Rome? Why? Surely it's much faster to fly – and much cheaper.

The short answer is that I love to travel, I love history, I love adventure, I love to walk and I love the Catholic faith.

I remember my father saying that air travel had made a generation of “travelled illiterates”. He meant that air travellers had no sense of the distance of their journey, no sense of its difficulty, no sense of the territory between the airports of departure and arrival. He preferred to drive, if he could.

And so do I. But while driving permits (demands) more contact and engagement with people, it also can be pretty superficial. But to walk – this really is the way to engage with the terrain, with its history, and with the locals and their culture.

Walking is the natural pace; all our senses have evolved to process sensations at a no faster than walking speed. Modern transportation is like a radical speeding up of a film.

Modern transportation is very recent: roughly 50 years for air travel, 100 for cars and 160 for trains. For all of previous history people walked from A to B. If they were rich, they might use a horse or a boat. But most folk – soldiers, merchants, pilgrims – walked.

So to walk through Europe at 15 to 20 miles a day will be to re-connect with the past, to see the world as Europeans saw it for most of their history. And to experience the difficulties they faced: the vagaries of the weather, route-finding, language, crossing the Alps in the winter....

Two years ago I broke my femur cross-country skiing and I'm still recovering. Perhaps a good long walk will speed the process.

But why Rome? That question will be the subject of another blog.