Читать книгу The Pennine Way - the Path, the People, the Journey онлайн

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Walking a long distance for recreation and fun, as opposed to doing it for work, a religious pilgrimage or because you had no other transport, was something that had actually begun in continental Europe some years before. As Colin Speakman explains in his 2011 book Walk!, the Westweg (West Way) had been developed in the Black Forest of Germany in 1900 by the Black Forest Society, and before long other popular trails emerged and similar networks grew in places like the Vosges. Young Germans (who called themselves Wandervögel or ‘wandering birds’) poured out of the cities to explore the countryside. They began to enjoy a growing and ever more intricate system of marked paths linking one walkers’ hostel to another, the paths often depicted by no more than simple splashes of paint on a tree trunk or rock.

This idea of purposefully creating a waymarked long-distance walking route soon spread to Sweden, then crossed the Atlantic to America, where the 265-mile Long Trail was established in Vermont, stretching from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. However, the Appalachian Way (or Trail), completed in 1937, was the first long-distance path that really captured the national imagination and whose scope (2100 miles from Georgia to Maine) matched the ambition and grandeur of the United States.