And did those feet

It's around this time of year, after a week or two of relentless and enthusiastic gluttony, that our thoughts turn to, well, more relentless and enthusiastic gluttony, usually. In general though, most of us eventually greet the new year with every intention of detoxing, getting fit and generally sorting out what passes for our lives. Most of the time this culminates in nothing more than a few mornings of reluctant, half-interested sit-ups and several months' expensive and entirely unused gym membership; but a couple of years ago I didn't just talk the new year's resolution talk, I literally walked the walk.

Walking is the best form of travel there is, and I will fight anyone – shirts off, in a pub car park – who would care to argue otherwise. As a travel writer, I travel a lot. I once wrote a book about the global legacy of Elvis Presley, which involved so much relentless travelling in the course of a year that one day, sitting on a bench in the old part of Montreal, I actually forgot where I was. Not just which city I was in, I couldn't think which country I was in and all but ordered a coffee in faltering schoolboy German having deduced that I was in Leipzig, where I'd been the previous week.

The nature of my work and its attendant deadlines meant that I was doing a huge amount of air travel. I was crossing so many time zones that I'm sure at one point I passed myself over the Pacific and wished myself a happy birthday for the previous and following days. This also meant my carbon footprint was the size of a clown's shoe. I hadn't just made a hole in the ozone layer, I'd carved my name into it. It had to stop.

Driving largely leaves me cold. At the time I discovered the miracle of perambulation I was living in London where, although the public transport system is creaky and hugely overpriced, it's still a million times better than driving through the city. It seemed that every time I needed to use the car, it had been so long that I had to call out the AA to charge up the flat battery. I was about to get rid of the car myself before I was aided by some helpful but inept thieves who managed to write it off in an unsuccessful attempt to steal it.

Rail travel is ok, as long as you're not in Britain and hence remortgaging your house in order to afford an off-peak return to Faversham and don't mind the relentless 'tss-tss' of other people's earphones, while the bicycle is a half-decent option as long as you don't mind wearing a fluorescent plastic helmet and being forced into parked cars and hedgerows by passing SUVs (at least you can apparently ignore traffic lights though).

All in all then, walking is where it's at. It was a couple of years ago, around this time of year, that I realised this. I'd reached my mid-30s and needed to arrest the expansion of my waistline, whose number in inches had bypassed my inside leg measurement and was looking increasingly likely to overtake my age soon afterwards.

I thought about running, I thought about joining a gym. I considered taking up football again. I did a lot of thinking in fact, and very little calorie burning. Eventually, I went for a walk around the park at the end of the road and since then I've not looked back.

For my new book, And Did Those Feet: Walking Through 2000 Years of British and Irish History, I set out on the trail of some of the great journeys from the past. I followed Boudica as she hurtled out of Norfolk to burn down Colchester, London and, curiously, St Albans, before disappearing into the fog of myth to meet her end at a battle whose location remains a mystery. I followed King Harold on his 300-mile route march from the Battle of Stamford Bridge to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, growing to greatly admire an exceptional man unfairly destined to be remembered just as the last bloke to lose England.

In Scotland I yomped around on the trail of Mary, Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie; in Wales I clocked up soggy, rainy miles emulating the great Welsh prince Owain Glyndwr; and on the Isle of Man I walked in the (little) footsteps of the quirky, priapic twelfth century Manx king known as Olaf the Dwarf. I ended up in the wilds of Connemara, recreating a tragic event that was to prove curiously and exhilaratingly uplifting. On the way I saw two ghosts, broke two toes, kept bumping into a long dead Welsh royal family in unlikely places and narrowly escaped the murderous intentions of a Peterborough driving instructor, but most of all I met some terrific people and saw some incredible things, none of which I would have done flying over them trying to work the seatback video screen and eating pretzels. Add to that how my thighs have never been so defined and my buttocks so pert and you can see why I lay down the pub car park challenge above.

Go on, go for a walk. I guarantee the rosy-cheeked, hard-breathing sense of well-being that you'll experience on a wintry day when the frost makes everything look magical and you can feel the freshness of the air chilling you down to the very bottom of your lungs will eclipse any other form of exercise or transportation. You'll thank me for it, I promise.

Charlie is a bestselling travel writer, award-winning broadcaster and the author of seven previous books, including Attention All Shipping and In Search of Elvis. He lives in Ireland with a large collection of ukuleles.

Read The Charlie Connelly Interview.

Author: Charlie Connelly
Date: 8 January 2009
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