Idea! How to walk more and love where you live

Eager to make use of some scraps of time Alice discovered an addictive mile-munching method.

Alice Norman inspired the community with her ongoing project – walking every metre of every path within a 100km square near her home. Alice highlights the paths she’s walked on an old OS map and says she recommends it as a brilliant motivator: “Especially if, like me, you don't like walking the same paths. I also walk long-distance footpaths but this gives me a focus for walks nearer home. I find if I go out without a planned route I give up after about 5 miles, bored. But if I have a route planned, and I’m ticking off paths, I'm happy to do 12 to 15 miles.”

Alice loves long walks but says this gives her a spur to make more use of spare bits of time: “When I don't have a full day for walking, this spurs me to go out and keep my miles up. Now I’m on 1273 so far this year and I’ve found pretty places, fascinating places and places I never want to revisit. And I'm more deeply fascinated by the area covered by Landranger 174 than ever before!”


More local walking inspiration

‘If you sign up to be a Parish Path Warden with your local Ramblers group you can regularly check on all the paths in a particular parish to help keep them open.’ – Kerry Forkner

‘Check out an app called ‘Strut’ – an app which divides the world into millions of tiles which you collect by walking in them’ – Lesley Dixon

‘When we’re doing walks from our house we try to include a bit of a different path each time. We currently have about 50 different routes to our local pub ranging from the 3.26 mile out and back to 15 mile circulars. Now we’ll plot them on a map to make sure we haven’t missed any – Katie Martin

‘I recommend a website called Wandrer Earth. I'm over 35% through walking all the paths in my local area but you can log walks anywhere in the world. Also cycling if that's your thing’ – Ellie Maccas