On a freezing February evening I found myself on a Lincolnshire saltmarsh. Night was coming in full winter colours, long smears of pink and apple-green down in the west and pricks of starlight already overhead.

I could hear the incoming tide beginning to sluice and gurgle between me and the safety of the sea wall. Yet I walked seaward, out to the tip of the tongue of marsh, just to stand there alone amid the waters, just for that gourmet taste of abandonment and solitude, that humbling whiff of danger.

Beautiful views from high hills, the smash of the restless sea on the rocks, sleepy villages where we long to nestle: we think of them and sigh, promising ourselves that this weekend we will forsake the TV and the BlackBerry, and we will we really will go walking. Exercise, stimulation, the enthralment of the five senses with bird song and wind caress and a pint of local beer at journey’s end: we know they are out there, just a field path and a kissing gate away.

In this, our third walking supplement, Times writers again share their delight in such modest enjoyments. But it is another order of fulfilment that emerges most vividly from these selections - the elemental pleasure of escape, of walking somewhere wild and lonely and potentially hazardous, the precious feeling of being where others are not.

Times Walks: the 100 best walks in the UK

Find your favourite ramble, print it out, pack your rucksack, and head out into the countryside or city

• Times Walks: Portesham and Hardy’s Monument, Dorset

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• The best walks in the British Isles

The 12 best pubs in England and Wales

Alastair Sawday praises the determined and imaginative owners in his choice

• London's 10 best pubs

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• Walk London: 27 walks in the capital

For city-dwellers, Londoners especially, such waking dreams are as heady as any drug. It is William Yeats’s nostalgic yearning, as powerful now as when he scribbled The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a London room in 1888:

"I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core."

You don’t have to travel to sweet Sligo to taste this transcendent aspect of walking. Richard Brass, who writes the Pub Champion column in Times Weekend, goes to the Berkshire Downs, that dramatic country of sweeping hills and big skies, as a sovereign cure for self-pity and groundless anxieties.

"Worse things happen at sea,” my sailor father used to say in the face of crises great or small, and the Pub Champion likewise contemplates the grim old gibbet on Inkpen Beacon to regain a sense of proportion. Striding the ancient trackways of the chalk ridge, “layers of space and time emerge to put your petty problems into context”.

If such mild countryside as the downlands of southern England can level out a walker’s thinking in this way, how much more acute that sense of one’s own littleness becomes when one penetrates the wilds of Britain’s outermost regions.