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Our network of paths is as much an industrial relic as any bit of rusty old winching gear on a canal bank. Paths are spare and lean, not wasting a moment as they find the best way through for the ghostly legion of posties, farmers, miners, traders, priests, tramps, quarrymen, gypsies, milk maidens and factory workers who scuffed them deep into the earth. That we can still trace them and, for the most part walk them, is something of which we should be inordinately proud.

How our needs have changed though. These workaday paths of sweat and grease are now our leisure lifelines. We escape to them, seek solace from them, shut out the gibber and bleeps of the modern world on them. Most of all, we walk them to rid ourselves of the all-pervasive car, something that has changed the landscape, and our relationship with it, far more comprehensively than the enclosures ever managed. Just a few hours walking off-road makes re-encountering traffic such a shock, for it brings home the brutality of the culture on which we’ve become so hooked. As my year of walking progressed, I became ever more fascinated by how different were the places that you could still only reach by path, and I started to steer my routes to seek some of them out.

Railway stations with no road access have a very singular appeal. There’s a holiday jaunt feeling at Berney Arms in the Norfolk Broads, and a Buchanesque sense of foreboding at Corrour station, on Rannoch Moor in the Highlands of Scotland. Just down the road from me is Dyfi Junction, where the mid-Wales line splits north and south. It is just two platforms in the middle of a peat bog, accessed only along a track that soon degenerates into a path, waders and sea-birds suddenly squawking into the air as you pass by. It is also where, for at least 1,500 years, the main ancient kingdoms – and the counties, still – of Wales have met, where the mountains of the north meet the rolling greenery of the south, the scattered hill farms of the east look out over the sea of the west. The beating heart of Wales is a bog-ridden railway station that almost no-one ever uses.

For an even more surreal experience, thanks to its place in the coat-tails of the suburbs, catch a train to Middlewood station, on the line between Manchester and Buxton. Never has a station been so well named, for it is indeed in the middle of a wood – and that’s it. No car park, no nearby road, just footpaths and a cycle route radiate out from the platforms, quietly slipping through the trees to who knows where. Just south of the up platform, the Norbury Brook tumbles down a waterfall. Once the train has departed, the sound of the hissing water is all there is to hear. It is the most unearthly, and quite beautiful, experience, and transforms getting a busy suburban train out of Piccadilly and Stockport into a trip on the Hogwarts Express.

Pubs to which people have no choice but to walk are also very special. Folk arrive in a car at a pub, they often stay in their own impenetrable huddle; a reliable rule of thumb is that the amount of fun to be had in a pub is in inverse proportion to the size of its car park. Two of my best pub sessions ever took place in the Isis Tavern, on the Thames Path at Oxford, and the Turf Hotel on the Exe estuary in Devon, both inaccessible by car. It produces a rare, convivial atmosphere, one where everyone is on the same level and is already fairly relaxed when they arrive. I’m yet to manage a pub crawl around the remoter off-road outposts of Scotland, but it’s extremely high on the to-do list. The same with churches, and there are many of these, their sanctuary appeal augmented by the fact that you can only walk to them. The fields of Norfolk are particularly stuffed with fine examples, as are the empty hills of the Marches, albeit of a far humbler variety. England’s smallest church, at Culbone in Somerset, is an exquisite stop on the South West Coast Path, as is the imposing hilltop St Martha’s on the Pilgrim’s Way near Guildford.

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