A hike is a long, vigorous walk, usually on trails or footpaths in the countryside. Walking for pleasure developed in Europe during the eighteenth century. Long hikes as part of a religious pilgrimage have existed for a much longer time. "Hiking" is the preferred term in Canada and the United States; the term "walking" is used in these countries for shorter, particularly urban walks. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the word "walking" describes all forms of walking, whether it is a walk in a park or backpacking in the Alps. The word hiking is also often used in the UK, along with rambling, hillwalking, and fell walking (a term mostly used for hillwalking in northern England). The term bushwalking is endemic to Australia. In New Zealand a long, vigorous walk or hike is called tramping. It is a common activity with numerous hiking organizations worldwide.
Related terms
Hiking means walking outdoors on a trail or off-trail for recreational purposes. A "day hike" refers to a hike that can be completed in a single day. In Northern England, including the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, "fell walking" describes hill or mountain walks, as fell is the common word for both features in these locations.
Hiking sometimes involves bushwhacking and is sometimes referred to as such. This specifically refers to difficult walking through dense forest, undergrowth, or bushes where forward progress requires pushing vegetation aside. In extreme cases of bushwhacking, where the vegetation is so dense that human passage is impeded, a machete is typically used to clear a pathway. The Australian term bushwalking refers to both on and off-trail hiking. Common terms for hiking used by New Zealanders are tramping (particularly for overnight and longer trips), walking or bushwalking. Trekking describes multi-day hiking in mountainous regions. Hiking a long-distance trail from end-to-end is also referred to as trekking or thru-hiking. Multi-day hikes are referred to as backpacking, that can involve camping, mountain huts, or using other forms of accommodation.
History
The 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch is frequently mentioned as an early example of someone hiking. Petrarch recounts that on April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux, which is tall. This is a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity. The exploit is described in a celebrated letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the Augustinian friar Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. However, some have suggested that Petrarch's climb was fictional.
Jakob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (in German in 1860) declared Petrarch "a truly modern man", because of the significance of nature for his "receptive spirit"; even if he did not yet have the skill to describe nature. Petrarch's implication that he was the first to climb mountains for pleasure, and Burckhardt's insistence on Petrarch's sensitivity to nature have been often repeated since. There are also numerous references to Petrarch as an "alpinist", although Mont Ventoux is not a hard climb, and is not usually considered part of the Alps.Bishop, p.102,104 This implicit claim of Petrarch and Burckhardt, that Petrarch was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since antiquity, was disproven by Lynn Thorndike in 1943. Mount Ventoux was climbed by Jean Buridan, on his way to the papal court in Avignon before the year 1334, "in order to make some meteorological observations". There were ascents accomplished during the Middle Ages; JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue. Lynn Thorndike mentions that "a book on feeling for nature in Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, noted various ascents and descriptions of mountains from that period", and that "in the closing years of his life archbishop Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne (c. 1010 – 1075) climbed his beloved mountain oftener than usual".
Other early examples of individuals hiking or climbing mountains for pleasure include the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, who ascended Mount Etna during a return trip from Greece in 125 CE. In 1275, Peter III of Aragon claimed to have reached the summit of Pic du Canigou, a 9134-foot mountain located near the southern tip of France. The first ascent of any technical difficulty to be officially verified took place on June 26, 1492, when Antoine de Ville, a chamberlain and military engineer for Charles VIII, King of France, was ordered to ascend Mont Aiguille. Because ropes, ladders and iron hooks were used during the ascent, this event is widely recognized as being the birth of mountaineering. Conrad Gessner, a 16th-century Swiss physician, botanist and naturalist, is widely recognized as being the first person to hike and climb for sheer pleasure.
However, the idea of taking a walk in the countryside only really developed during the 18th century in Europe, and arose because of changing attitudes to the landscape and nature associated with the Romantic movement. In 1790, William Wordsworth set off on an extended tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany, which he describes in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850). Walking tours were popular in the 19th century. In earlier times walking generally indicated poverty and was also associated with vagrancy. In previous centuries long walks were undertaken as part of religious pilgrimages and this tradition continues throughout the world.
Pilgrimages
In earlier times people mainly hiked for practical reasons, or on religious pilgrimages. Numerous modern hiking trail follow such ancient routes. The British National Trail the North Downs Way closely follows that of the Pilgrims' Way to Canterbury.
The ancient pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, has become more recently the source for a number of long-distance hiking routes. This is a network of pilgrims' ways leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Many follow its routes as a form of spiritual path or retreat for their spiritual growth.
The French Way is the most popular of the routes and runs from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles on the Spanish side and then another on to Santiago de Compostela through the major cities of Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos and León. A typical walk on the Camino francés takes at least four weeks, allowing for one or two rest days on the way. Some travel the Camino on bicycle or on horseback. Paths from the cities of Tours, Vézelay, and Le Puy-en-Velay meet at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. The French long-distance path GR 65 (of the Grande Randonnée network), is an important variant route of the old Christian pilgrimage way.
The Abraham Path is a cultural route believed to have been the path of Abraham's journey across the Ancient Near East. The path was established in 2007 as a pilgrimage route between Urfa, Turkey, possibly his birthplace, and his final destination of the desert of Negev.
German-speaking world The Swiss scientist and poet Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen (1732) is an historically important early sign of an awakening appreciation of the mountains, though it is chiefly designed to contrast the simple, idyllic life of the inhabitants of the Alps with the corrupt and decadent existence of the dwellers in the plains.
Numerous travellers explored Europe on foot in the last third of the 18th century and recorded their experiences. A significant example is Johann Gottfried Seume, who set out on foot from Leipzig to Sicily in 1801, and returned to Leipzig via Paris after nine months.
United Kingdom
Thomas West, a Scottish priest, popularized the idea of walking for pleasure in his guide to the Lake District of 1778. In the introduction he wrote that he aimed "to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations." To this end he included various 'stations' or viewpoints around the lakes, from which tourists would be encouraged to enjoy the views in terms of their aesthetic qualities. Published in 1778 the book was a major success.
Another famous early exponent of walking for pleasure was the English poet William Wordsworth. His famous poem Tintern Abbey was inspired by a visit to the Wye Valley made during a walking tour of Wales in 1798 with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. Wordsworth's friend Coleridge was another keen walker and in the autumn of 1799, he and Wordsworth undertook a three-week tour of the Lake District. John Keats, who belonged to the next generation of Romantic poets, began in June 1818 a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District with his friend Charles Armitage Brown.
More and more people undertook walking tours through the 19th century, of which the most famous is probably Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through the Cévennes in France with a donkey, recorded in his Travels with a Donkey (1879). Stevenson also published in 1876 his famous essay "Walking Tours". The subgenre of travel writing produced many classics in the subsequent 20th century. An early American example of a book that describes an extended walking tour is the naturalist John Muir's A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), a posthumously published account of a long botanizing walk, undertaken in 1867.
Due to industrialisation in England, people began to migrate to the cities where living standards were often cramped and unsanitary. They would escape the confines of the city by rambling about in the countryside. However, the land in England, particularly around the urban areas of Manchester and Sheffield, was privately owned and trespass was illegal. Rambling clubs soon sprang up in the north and began politically campaigning for the legal 'right to roam'. One of the first such clubs was 'Sunday Tramps' founded by Leslie White in 1879. The first national grouping, the Federation of Rambling Clubs, was formed in London in 1905 and was heavily patronized by the peerage.
Access to Mountains bills, that would have legislated the public's 'right to roam' across some private land, were periodically presented to Parliament from 1884 to 1932 without success. Finally, in 1932, the Rambler's Right Movement organized a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. Despite attempts on the part of the police to prevent the trespass from going ahead, it was successfully achieved due to massive publicity. However, the Mountain Access Bill that was passed in 1939 was opposed by many walkers' organizations, including The Ramblers, who felt that it did not sufficiently protect their rights, and it was eventually repealed.
The effort to improve access led after World War II to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, and in 1951 to the creation of the first national park in the UK, the Peak District National Park. The establishment of this and similar national parks helped to improve access for all outdoors enthusiasts. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 considerably extended the right to roam in England and Wales.
United States