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Know how to tramp and you know how to live… Know how to meet your fellow-wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of nature and how to be active to its wildness and its rigour.
The tramp is a friend of society; a seeker, they pay their way if they can. One includes in the category 'tramp' all true Bohemians, pilgrims, explorers afoot, walking tourists, and the like. Tramping is a way of approach, to nature, to your fellow man, to a nation, to beauty, to life itself. It is a gentle art and there is much to learn; illusions to overcome, prejudices and habits to be shaken off.
The adventure is not the getting there, it is the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfilment of prophecy but the providence of something better than prophesied.
Originally published in 1926, The Gentle Art of Tramping is a guide for anyone who has dreamed of taking to the road with nothing more than a bag full of essentials and big ideas. It gives guidance on walking, being open to discovery and being kind – advice as relevant now as it was then.
Stephen Graham (1884–1975) was a British journalist, travel writer and novelist. His books recount his travels around pre-revolutionary Russia and to Jerusalem with a group of Russian Christian pilgrims. Most of his works express sympathy for the poor, for agricultural labourers and vagabonds, and his distaste for industrialisation. He was the son of the editor of Country Life.
"An absolute gem of a book"
– Alastair Humphreys, Microadventures: Local Adventures for Great Escapes
"A hymn to the wilderness of the the British Isles"
– Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places
"A wonderful book, so many of its points as valid now as they were a hundred years ago. A great catalyst for getting people off their backsides and out into wild places, with its can-do attitude [...] The pages of my copy are so dog-eared from turning down the corners to mark yet another quotable gem that I can hardly close it."
– Christopher Somerville, The January Man: A Year of Walking Britain
"Beware this book, it's a wolf in sheep's clothing – a thrillingly subversive life philosophy dressed in alluring practical advice. Strongly recommended for rebels and the restless"
– Tristan Gooley, The Natural Navigator
"The Gentle Art of Tramping is Mr. Graham's masterpiece"
– New York Herald
