Walk! A Celebration of Striding Out by Colin Speakman is published by Great Northern Books, priced £15.99

I was 24. I’d had a long illness and was fed up. Suddenly, that summer, I decided to chuck in my boring civil service job, and walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

So I did. I bought a rucksack, a lightweight one-man tent, a meths-fuelled cooking stove, a sleeping bag and a pair of walking shoes (not boots) and jumped on the train for Inverness. From there I caught a bus to the north-east tip of Scotland and, on Friday, July 13, started walking.

It took me 11 weeks, and I calculated that by the time I reached Land’s End on September 22, I’d walked 1,100 miles. I’d got through three pairs of shoes (one of which was eaten by a horse), countless OS maps, and more packets of instant soup than were good for me.

Along the way, I’d been dive-bombed by a buzzard, chased by a bull, and had an encounter with a Scottish shepherd in the middle of nowhere who, when I told him where I was going, gave me a smile of such shy delight that it still warms me to this day.

I saw some wonderful things: Rannoch Moor on a brooding summer afternoon; the glorious footpath that leaps and twists amongst the silver birches along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond; and, perhaps best of all, the butter-green swells of the Yorkshire Dales, given shape and heartbreaking texture by the network of stone walls that trace the line of hill and valley.

That long walk was restorative, rejuvenating. It made me feel wonderfully alive.

But what I remember more than anything is the way the landscape unrolled before me each day. I woke every morning with a tingle of excitement about what I’d find over the next hill. I felt a part of the landscape unfolding around me. It seemed to me then – and does still – that walking was the only real way to travel; the only real way to get to the heart and soul of a place.

My wife, who is Chinese, doesn’t agree. Walking, she says, is a way of getting from A-B. It’s not something you do for enjoyment.

Her main gripe, however, whenever I return from a trek in the Dales or Moors, is about the smug expression I invariably wear. Why does walking make you feel morally superior? she asks.

Colin Speakman giggles when I tell him this. But it is true, he admits: here in Britain many of us do tend to think of walking or hiking as a kind of noble hobby.

If anyone is qualified to explain why, it is Colin. He is the founder-secretary of the Yorkshire Dales Society, and the man credited with creating the popular Dales Way.

He is also the author of about 40 books – the most recent of them Walk!, which is subtitled, appropriately enough ‘A Celebration of Striding Out.’ It is just that, and in it Colin gives one possible answer for why walking has become a kind of noble activity. And it’s not just because it is good for our health.

“To some extent walking for pleasure has now become a rejection of the consumerist values of modern society, a re-assertion of older values,” he writes.

We’ve always walked, of course: but for countless centuries, just as my wife points out, we walked because we had to: it was, for most of us, the only way of getting around.

All that began to change with the industrial revolution. And then came the Romantics – poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, and painters such as Turner – who saw in nature something beautiful, something natural, that was opposed to the grim, grinding bleakness of industrial life.

They inspired a cultural change: a hunger to experience nature which led to the rise of walking as a popular pastime. This, in turn, led in the 20th century to the creation of national parks, and of the rights of way legislation that, between them, have had such a profound impact on the landscape of Britain.

Colin’s book isn’t a guide to some of his favourite walks. Instead, it is an account of how walking came to play such an important part in British life.

It covers the Romantics; the protest movements that led to the creation of the national parks; and the road to right-to-roam legislation that opened up so much countryside that was previously closed.

Along the way Colin introduces us to key figures in the struggle for the right to roam: from the Romantic poets to people like George Trevelyan, the historian, essayist and champion of walking in the countryside who, in 1930, became the first president of the Youth Hostels Association.

Throughout, the book is studded with quotes which bring alive the joys of walking, like this from the Victorian walker George Gissing. “I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid broad pastures up to the rolling moor,” he wrote. “Up and up, till my feet brush through heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me. Under a glowing sky of summer, this air of the upland has a still life which… makes the heart bound.”

Wensleydale does have that effect. But then, so do large parts of the moors and dales. So why not get out there and get some of that glorious fresh air in your lungs.

• Walk! A Celebration of Striding Out by Colin Speakman is published by Great Northern Books, priced £15.99