Interactive map of Britain's greatest walks and the best pubs, hotels and B&Bs

When the sun appears in springtime, our thoughts turn to walking. After the confinement of winter’s cold wet days, icy winds, muddy paths and gloomy afternoons, the smiling face of spring is an irresistible invitation.

Of course there are those robust or resolute enough to confront winter’s worst and to keep going for daily walks, but even they must acknowledge that when bluebells are in flower, and trees are bright with the luminous green of fresh new leaf, there is an added motive to fling open one’s front door and stride out.

Walking is the nation’s favourite activity. And, at a time when many of us are economising on gym membership and overseas holidays, this trend is accelerating. The National Trust says that a year ago its walks information was being downloaded only 200 times a month; the figure is now 10,000.

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And the Ramblers association is reporting an increase in membership, particularly among those aged 20-40, who are now its fastest-growing sector. All that is required is a pair of feet and anything from a spare quarter of an hour to a whole day.

It was a saying once current that a poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, and a rich man must walk to get stomach for his meat. In relative terms we are all rich now, and are well advised if we walk to keep our appetites, or at least our digestive tracts, in good order.

The historian, G. M. Trevelyan, once remarked that he had two doctors, his right leg and his left leg, and no one ever spoke truer word. If proof were needed, try a full morning’s walk in the country air, and then see what a cheese sandwich and a glass of water taste like. Neither the finest caviar nor the nectar of the gods comes close.

Trevelyan used to shake off colds and other ailments by going off on a long march. And he lived in an age of heroic health walkers; his contemporary, Bertrand Russell, used to walk 30 miles a day for several weeks each summer, and lived to be 98.

A few minutes pondering the anatomy of homo sapiens shows that we are constructed for the purpose of walking. Even the defects of our anatomy — the damage so easily done to knees and ankles by rugby, running, bowling a cricket ball: I carry the twinges still — press the point that walking is the optimal activity.

The engineering of our bones, muscles and ligaments, our heels, the splay and order of our toes, the orientation of our hips and the balance of our spinal columns have evolved to carry us along in the walking gait at a walking pace with maximum advantage and minimum hurt. No wonder then that failing to use all this equipment, so handily tailored by time and natural selection, is bad for us: no wonder that its use is so good for us.

But it is not only bodily health that follows from employing our legs in their proper office. Someone once said that the surest cure for a short temper was a long walk. But one does not have to be depressed to benefit from a walk; any mood, even a good one, is made better by it.

And walking benefits not only body and mood, but intellect too. Whereas certain kinds of exercise — pole-vaulting, say, or lifting weights in a gym — make thinking impossible, walking is a great promoter of reflection. “The moment my legs move,” said Thoreau, “my thoughts begin to flow.”

In his superb essay, On Going A Journey, Hazlitt explained that he liked to walk alone, and could not see the sense in walking and talking at the same time. He preferred solitude so that he could think, so that he could have “a little breathing space to muse on indifferent matters”, and liked to contemplate arriving hungry at an inn just as the first candles were being lit in its windows.

In this respect Hazlitt was quite unlike Mark Twain, who claimed that the point of going for a walk is to have a good conversation. This difference of opinion alerts us to an important implication of the remark made above — that there are many different kinds of walk, from the tremendous hike to the parkland stroll.

Obviously enough, certain types of walking — like the parkland stroll — more naturally and appropriately lend themselves to conversation. There is no reason why a long country walk cannot be conversable too, but someone who wished to think hard and deeply about something, and sought to do so up hill and down dale over a sufficient number of hours, would clearly do better to walk alone, or with someone who equally loved silence.

Walking is the right speed at which to see the world. If you paint all the colours on a ball and then spin it, they merge into grey; that is the problem with going too fast. The countryside today is the motorwayside for most people, whizzing past in a blur that makes it all look the same.

Walking is the only speed at which you can get from one place to another while still seeing things properly, so that you can give them their due and notice what is worthwhile. Moreover, walking allows you to stop when it would be right to do so, for any of the reasons that might press: to study something close up, or to help someone who has fallen into a ditch.

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing,” Aldous Huxley wrote — meaning that refreshment of one’s innermost self comes from being in nature.