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Walking is one of the most popular outdoor recreational activities in the United Kingdom,〔(Ramblers Association website: Walking Facts and Figures )〕 and within England and Wales there is a comprehensive network of rights of way that permits easy access to the countryside. Access is also easy in Scotland but not in Northern Ireland. Walking is used in the United Kingdom to describe a range of activity, from a walk in the park to trekking in the Alps. "Hiking" is used in the UK, but less often than walking. Rambling is also used, and the main organisation that supports walking is the Ramblers. Walking in mountainous areas in the UK is called hillwalking, or in Northern England, including the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, fellwalking, from the dialect word fell, for high, uncultivated land. Mountain walking can sometimes involve scrambling. ==History== The idea of undertaking a walk through the countryside for pleasure developed in the 18th-century, and arose because of changing attitudes to the landscape and nature, associated with the Romantic movement.〔''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'', ed. M. H,Abrams, vol.2 (7th edition) (2000), p. 9-10.〕 In earlier times walking generally indicated poverty and was also associated with vagrancy.〔Rebecca Solnit, ''Wanderlust: A History of Walking''. New York: Penguin Books, 2000, p.83, and note p.297.〕 Thomas West, an English clergyman, popularized the idea of walking for pleasure in his guide to the Lake District of 1778. In the introduction he wrote that he aimed to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations. To this end he included various "stations" or viewpoints around the lakes, from which tourists would be encouraged to appreciate the views in terms of their aesthetic qualities.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Development of tourism in the Lake District National Park )〕 Published in 1778 the book was a major success.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Understanding the National Park — Viewing Stations )〕 Another famous early exponent of walking for pleasure was the English poet William Wordsworth. In 1790 he embarked on an extended tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany, a journey subsequently recorded in his long autobiographical poem ''The Prelude'' (1850). His famous poem ''Tintern Abbey'' was inspired by a visit to the Wye Valley made during a walking tour of Wales in 1798 with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. Wordsworth's friend Coleridge was another keen walker and in the autumn of 1799, he and Wordsworth undertook a three weeks tour of the Lake District. John Keats, who belonged to the next generation of Romantic poets began, in June 1818, a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. More and more people undertook walking tours through the 19th-century, of which the most famous is probably Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through the Cévennes in France with a donkey, recorded in his ''Travels with a Donkey'' (1879). Stevenson also published in 1876 his famous essay "Walking Tours". The subgenre of travel writing produced many classics in the subsequent 20th-century. An early American example of a book that describes an extended walking tour is naturalist John Muir's ''A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf'' (1916), a posthumous published account of a long botanizing walk, undertaken in 1867. Due to industrialisation in England, people began to migrate to the cities where living standards were often cramped and unsanitary. They would escape the confines of the city by rambling about in the countryside. However, the land in England, particularly around the urban areas of Manchester and Sheffield, was privately owned and trespass was illegal. Rambling clubs soon sprang up in the north and began politically campaigning for the legal 'right to roam'. One of the first such clubs, was 'Sunday Tramps' founded by Leslie White in 1879. The first national grouping, the Federation of Rambling Clubs, was formed in London in 1905 and was heavily patronized by the peerage. Access to Mountains bills, that would have legislated the public's 'right to roam' across some private land, were periodically presented to Parliament from 1884 to 1932 without success. Finally, in 1932, the Rambler’s Right Movement organized a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. Despite attempts on the part of the police to prevent the trespass from going ahead it was successfully achieved due to massive publicity. However the Mountain Access Bill that was passed in 1939 was opposed by many walkers, including the organization The Ramblers, who felt that it did not sufficiently protect their rights, and it was eventually repealed.〔(The Ramblers )〕 The effort to improve access led after World War II to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, and in 1951 to the creation of the first national park in the UK, the Peak District National Park. The establishment of this and similar national parks helped to improve access for all outdoors enthusiasts.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Kinder Trespass. A history of rambling )〕 The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 considerably extended the right to roam in England and Wales. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Walking in the United Kingdom」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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