The Independent Walker's Guide to Great Britain: 35 Enchanting Walks in Great Britain's Charming Landscape

My wife and I have used this book to select and guide 7 walks for two trips we have taken and highly recommend it as a guide to day trip walking, which is its focus. If you want to do continuous multi-day walks, then this is not your book. However the books that focus on multi-day trips can be overwhelming and difficult to use for day hikes. I own one of them also and so speak from experience. For day hikes the great strengths of this book are: 1. Its selectivity. The walks are great choices. Magnificent ways to experience the country. 2. The dry humor and pleasant style, something one doesn't expect to find in this form. One word of caution, however, allow some time to get a little lost, particularly if you don't have the maps he recommends, which we didn't. However, we never failed to find our way or complete the walk, so it does work and is great fun.

I really enjoyed reading this book, full of wonderful descriptions of easy, scenic walks. It gives lots of arguments for why you should try walking in Britain and lots of information for how to prepare. I decided I wanted to do mostly more strenuous hikes than what's covered here, but this book was my inspiration to think about seeing Britain on foot.