For decades the Ramblers have poetically spoken of the ‘refreshment of spirit’ brought about by walking, not only in remote places but indeed just about anywhere.

As you raise your glass, you might just reflect on that walk along the maligned, ‘flat and featureless’ Essex coast, and on how, if you look for it, it has a magisterial drama to match any on our native shores.

There can be no doubt that a national trail is a Good Thing. The South West Coast Path generates over £300 million a year for local businesses, and supports over 7,500 jobs. The case for establishing a path all round the coast could hardly be more compelling

Every year, hundreds of applications are made to divert footpaths all over England and Wales, and the Ramblers keeps a watchful eye on all of them. But only a few are challenged on the grounds of protecting a route’s historical character…

The Ramblers has lost a High Court case challenging how footpath diversion orders are approved in England and Wales – but the judgment has helped clarify the law…

It was a pleasing thing to think you trod the same surface as Walton and Cotton. You cannot think it so well now, because when I last looked somebody had buried it alive under tarmac.

If we are going to get people driving less and walking more, it won’t happen by making it lethal for them to travel in the countryside except encased in a vehicle.

The sun’s declining rays kept the butterflies about; marjoram scented the breeze; the ox-eye daisies and the bee-orchids were just finishing; agrimony, meadow vetchling, pyramid-orchids, white bedstraw, and rock rose and yarrow were out in force.

‘Roads, lanes, paths,’ wrote another twentieth-century poet, Geoffrey Grigson, ‘we use them without reflecting how they are some of man’s oldest inscriptions upon the landscape’. It’s time we reflected

Every few years there comes another anniversary of the Kinder Scout trespass, attended by walks, rallies, exhibitions, speeches and like festivity…