My grandparents introduced me to walking. A family tradition was a mass wander up a pretty little mountain called Bennachie in north-eastern Scotland not far from their farm. Aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts and dogs would trail up to Mither Tap, its rocky granite summit, pausing only to collect a flask of water from a spring called Hosie's Well, which my grandmother insisted made the best tea.
A couple of winters back, between Christmas and New Year, I found myself back on Bennachie for the first time in decades, with my American wife and one of the children of the cousins with whom I used to climb it. Under a deep covering of fresh snow it seemed entirely different from those childhood walks. A place transformed.
In the last few years our walks over the Christmas period have taken us up Cader Idris on the southern edge of the Snowdonia National Park on New Year's Day but more often than not to somewhere far more local – to Epping Forest on the edge of London. This year we plan to walk in the forest on Christmas morning and later in the Scottish mountains around Lochaber.
We won't be alone. The Ramblers, as it has done for 30 years, has organised 1,200 walks for its annual Festival of Winter Walks covering the holidays and it estimates some 15,000 of its members will join in. Tens of thousands more of us will set off with family or friends on similar excursions, some shorter, some longer, on urban walks through parks or through the wilder reaches of our countryside.
"There'll be thousands of people walking over the period of the winter festival this year," says Simon Barnett, director of walking programmes at the Ramblers. "Winter means a lot of different things to different people. As long as you are properly prepared there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing and bad preparation. It is about simple pleasures. In view of the economic challenges many are facing now, it is something that you can do for little or no cost."
And the most recent winter festivals, as he points out, have come in the midst of a boom period in access to the British countryside because of the introduction of new open-access rules under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. This is underlined by the fact that this year marked the 80th anniversary of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, which launched the battle that culminated in the creation of the new open-access legislation.
The launch of a website by the Ramblers last week makes it easier to find routes that can be downloaded to smartphones and GPS devices and organised walks for all abilities. Also this year the organisation, along with Macmillan Cancer Support, has taken on the Walking For Health scheme, formerly run by the government.
But what is it about walking at this time of year that makes it feel so special? Author and broadcaster Cameron McNeish, the former editor of The Great Outdoors, will walk up the glen outside his highland home this Christmas, a walk he does perhaps "two or three times most weeks".
"Those who do hill walk do it to get away from the city and into the countryside, away from man's handiwork. There's something about our high places that is primeval and unspoiled. Winter exaggerates that, especially if there is a covering of snow. It covers up the signs of man's presence but reveals other things as well. You see animal tracks you might not notice. It makes everyone feel like a bit of an explorer."
But there is something too about the fact of human traces in the countryside, its paths and chance encounters – as Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways, explained to my colleague Rachel Cooke earlier this year.
"Paths are human, an exploration of our ties to the ancient pathways of Britain's landscape," Macfarlane said. "They are the traces of our relationships, in some ways. The book inevitably began to be about chance meetings, and so things would just … happen … I still find that hard to explain, rationally."
Walking, too, is a social activity, no matter how much we associate it with the search for isolation. My first long-distance walk, aged 15, was along a large section of the Pennine Way. It was there that I discovered, as Macfarlane argues, that travelling on foot you fall into step with other people, their lives and stories, as well as becoming part of the landscape. Because most of us are not like Henry David Thoreau who in his treatise Walking, published in 1862, insisted there were very few who understood its true mysticism.
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking," wrote Thoreau then, "that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre' – to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a sainte-terrer', a saunterer – a holy-lander.
"They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean."
Most of us, however, are "idlers" and happy to be that, especially at this time of year, a point made by McNeish.
"There's no doubt that more people do get out, as families often, if only for a short walk to walk off the Christmas meal. It feels more social. It is a time of year when people are far more likely to say hello. And the other side of it is the knowledge that even if it's cold you are heading back to a warm house, to family and a glass of mulled wine."
