Wanderlust A History Of Walking

Getting to Grips With Wanderlust: A History Of Walking

I've read this book cover to cover twice now, and on the second pass I realized I had completely missed the point of the first chapter on flâneurs. That's the problem with how it was originally published — the structure doesn't announce itself. It's not a conventional history. It's a meditation that builds from personal experience into philosophy into actual history. If you're looking to download or acquire the book, it's available through most major retailers. The Kindle edition runs around ten dollars. The paperback is the version I'd recommend because you can actually scribble in the margins when something resonates. The audiobook exists but it's... complicated. McFarlane wrote it to be read slowly, often with pauses to look at something outside. The narrator reads it straight through at a pace that makes the prose feel rushed. I finished the audio version in four sittings and honestly felt like I'd skimmed a library book. Skip the audio unless you have a long drive ahead and don't actually want to retain anything.

Why Wanderlust A History Of Walking Still Matters

The core argument is straightforward enough on paper: walking is one of the most fundamental human activities and yet it has been systematically devalued in modern culture. McFarlane traces this from the Roman era through Christian attitudes toward pilgrimage and idleness, through the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, and into the industrial era where walking became associated with poverty and criminality rather than freedom. But the interesting part — the part nobody talks about — is how he uses walking as a method of thinking rather than just a subject. Each chapter is structured as a walk. The geography of where he's walking mirrors the intellectual territory he's covering. This means the book rewards rereading because you notice the connections between physical landscape and argument structure. Most first-time readers don't catch this. I didn't until I started walking the same routes he describes along the English coast and re-reading sections as I went. There's a specific chapter on the "aestheticization of waste" — his term for how walkers turned landfills and abandoned railways into walking trails — that initially confused me. I thought he was being contradictory. He's not. He's making a point about how capitalism repurposes its own refuse, even turning ecological damage into leisure infrastructure. I got stuck on this for weeks because my reading habit is linear and McFarlane writes circularly. What helped was just accepting that the confusion was part of the argument and moving forward. The clarity comes later, usually three or four chapters after the apparent contradiction.

Practical Reading Approach

Here's what actually works if you want to get the most out of this book without burning out. Read it in small sections. I know that sounds obvious but most people pick up a non-fiction book and try to power through. This one isn't built for that. Twenty pages at a time, ideally done outdoors, is the sweet spot. After twenty-five or thirty pages your brain starts treating the philosophical passages like filler and skimming them. That's when you miss the good stuff. Don't worry about finishing it in order on the first read. The book has recursive loops — references back to earlier chapters that don't land until you've encountered the later material. I found myself jumping around between the Victorian chapter and the opening flâneur section repeatedly. That's normal. It's how the book is designed to be consumed.

The notes at the end of each chapter are actually useful. Most academic writing treats endnotes as decoration. McFarlane uses them to expand on tangential points that would otherwise clutter the main text. I spent more time in the notes than in some chapters. Specifically his digression on Thomas De Quincey and the opium-eating walker is sharper than anything in the main argument about Victorian morality. One practical issue: the book references several walking routes that were active when it was published in 2013. Some of these have been altered or decommissioned since then. If you're planning to follow his suggested walks, check current trail status before committing. I drove forty minutes to reach a starting point he described near the Northumberland coast only to find a new housing development blocked access entirely. The workaround was to park at the nearest layby and walk in from there. You lose the exact geographic alignment with his text but the intellectual points still hold regardless of where you physically walk them.

What The Book Gets Wrong Or Misses

I'm going to be direct about this because I wish someone had told me before I bought it. The book has a significant blind spot regarding class and walking accessibility that McFarlane doesn't adequately address. He writes extensively about walking as a philosophical and liberatory practice, but he rarely examines who actually has the time, safety, and physical ability to walk for pleasure in the way he describes. A maintenance worker finishing a twelve-hour shift doesn't have the same relationship to walking as an academic with a sabbatical. He does touch on this briefly in the chapter about industrial Britain but it reads more like an acknowledgment than a sustained critique. If you want the follow-up he should have written, look into Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust" — it's a different book with a similar title and it engages much more seriously with the social dimensions of walking that McFarlane underplays. Another thing: the prose can be dense in places. There are paragraphs where he stacks three philosophical references into a single sentence without breaking for breath. I've seen people abandon the book at the chapter on phenomenology. Don't. Push through. The payoff comes when he connects Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodied perception back to the actual physical experience of walking on different surfaces. That synthesis is worth the friction.

If your main interest is the practical side of walking — route planning, gear, hiking technique — this isn't the book. It's about walking as cultural practice and intellectual tradition. I bought it expecting more of the former because the subtitle made me careless. Once I adjusted my expectations it became one of the better books I've read on the subject. The mismatch between expectation and content is the most common complaint I see in reviews, and it's entirely understandable. The final section on walking and literature brought things full circle in a way that felt earned rather than forced. His reading of Wordsworth alongside his own walking experience is the strongest chapter in the book. I keep coming back to it. Everything else is valuable but that chapter is where the whole project crystallizes into something you can carry with you after you close the cover.