The droving of huge herds of livestock for hundreds of miles to market was once a common sight across pre-industrial Britain, and the drovers’ trails they created offer some fine upland walking today. The Kerry Ridgeway among the Welsh Borders is one of the finest, so we sent Julian Rollins – without the livestock – to explore it for himself…

This new walking route follows the 56km/35-mile course of the enchanting River Arrow…

Underneath all the trappings of urban development, with its lattice of roads and rail, it’s easy to forget that Britain has a far more ancient and prevalent network running across it…

Author Sara Maitland won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1978 for her first novel, Daughter of Jerusalem, and found more recent fame with 2008’s A Book of Silence. Susan Gray talks to her about her new book exploring Britain’s forests, and asks how nature connects us all to the magical and divine…

With Hallowe’en upon us, Mark Rowe explores the morbid history of some of Britain’s most scenic ‘coffin trails’ and picks the best urban cemeteries for a ghoulish autumnal stroll…

Archaeologist and TV presenter Neil Oliver talks to Susan Gray about his new series on the Vikings, how walking connects him to the past, and his love affair with the coast…

As the immediate post-Olympic era seems set to revive the debate about the Big Society, especially as the 17,000 volunteer Games Makers were such a resounding success, it seems self-evident to me that we can learn a lot from organisations like Morley College and the Ramblers.

The Olympic Opening Ceremony invited us all to become part of history at an historic moment, and I hope that these guided walks do the same. I hope we create a wave of people young and old that will cherish these local areas: a lasting legacy of Our History rather than Them vs. Us, West vs. East, London vs. The Rest of the Country, or even Poor vs. Rich

The Ramblers played a key role in establishing National Trails. Tom Stephenson, the first Ramblers Secretary, envisioned “a long green trail from the Peak to the Cheviots…which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land.”

‘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