Notes from a Small Island

Written by American author Bill Bryson (first published in 1995), this is a humorous (laugh out loud) travel book about what he liked about the country so much.

There is a brilliant passage on male toilet humour that is actually hysterical and a true but not so complimentary encounter in North Wales, but the following excerpt sums up the reason why so many people actually enjoy trekking in Britain.

I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a book store and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical - where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion - but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub, and all being well back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordinance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in this terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in appropriate weather.

For years, I’ve watched these walker types toiling off up cloud-hidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheer-faced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble – that was the word he used – up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxing-sounding words, ‘amble’ and ‘Haystacks’ that lulled me from my natural caution.

‘Are you sure that it’s not too hard?’ I asked.

‘Nah, just an amble,’ John insisted.

Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been quite invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below. John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, smoking and chatting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest.

I gasped and ached and sputtered, and realized that I had never done anything remotely this unnatural before and vowed never to attempt such folly again.

And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fcuk me' I said, in a moment of special eloquence and realized that I was hooked. Ever since then I had come back whenever they would have me, and never complained and even started tucking my trousers in my socks. I couldn't wait for the morrow.