Performing a walking holiday: Routing,immersing and co-dwelling

Introduction

Walking tourism has a limited carbon footprint that reportedly involves and arguably enables tourists to engage with the socio-ecological context of the places they visit in greater depth than other forms of tourism that are characterised by rapid encounters with places. For these reasons, it is generally included under the label of ‘slow tourism’ (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010b). Interest in promoting walking to tourist audiences and in providing the infrastructure necessary for undertaking walking holidays, such as paths, way-markers, and walker-friendly accommodation and services, has increased in the last few years, with both local and national governments providing walking routes to support local development (see, for instance, Fabritius, 2018). With this aim a range of policies have been implemented that seek to exploit lesser-known tangible heritage sites, such as ‘minor’ monuments and examples of vernacular infrastructure, and intangible heritage, such as rituals, working traditions and everyday community life, in order to decrease the pressure of tourism in certain areas and support the local economy in socially and economically deprived areas through walking tourism (UNWTO, 2019).

This article concerns a personal walking holiday and the relationship between space, material practices, cognitive work and the emotions that were at work while I was walking. It focuses on the performative assemblages of people, objects, media, technologies and time-space that, together, convey the spatial experience of walking tourism. In particular, this article revisits the concept of ‘dwelling-in-motion’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 213, 214; see also Hannam and Roy, 2013) to ask: How is a walking holiday performed? This main question is broken up into the following sub-questions: How are goal-oriented and accidental movements jointly entangled by routing to stabilise a walking touristscape? How does the walking body progressively engage with, and become part of, an immersive spatial experience on the move? Which other bodies are involved in performing places through walking and how do they affect one another?

In order to address these questions, this article merges a mobility approach to tourism with walking studies (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Middleton, 2011) and non-/more-than-representational theories (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Lorimer, 2005). It engages with the lesson learnt from John Wylie (2005) when using a personal walk to engage with and explore geographical issues connected with walking holidays and to question walking touristscapes.

This article employs three different arguments, with each argument reflecting a different level of analysis.

The first argument concerns movement, particularly the understanding of tourism as a phenomenon in which tourists are always on the move and always following one linear mobility pattern; a critique made by Hannam and Roy (2013). While it is obvious to perceive specific kinds of tourism – such as walking tourism – as a tourist style involving a great deal of physical movement, in fact they also include being in place, scattered movement or mobility patterns.

The second argument is that, although walking holidays have become a more common and specialised consumer domain (Hall et al., 2018), they are not an intuitive and accessible mobile commodity. Therefore, in order to better understand walking holidays, one must understand the physical, cognitive, and affective implications of the body moving into diverse environments and engaging with multiple entities.

If the recent tendency to employ phenomenological accounts of tourism provides a potentially interesting approach for exploring the production of new touristscapes via walking performances, it should also be acknowledged that few studies have demonstrated this empirically (for an exception see Olafsdottir, 2013). This point constitutes the basis for this article’s third argument, which it discusses by examining walking studies, and walking as a methodology, specifically.

This exploration is divided into five parts. Following a literature review on tourism and walking, a conceptual framework for this article is developed based on the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ literature (see Hannam, 2008 with reference to its engagement with tourism). A conceptual framework that integrates the mobilities approach with insights from both walking studies and non-/more-than-representational theories is used to inform the empirical basis of the study. Within the perspective adopted in this paper, walking is considered as a ‘mode of thought’ and a way of considering research (Wylie, 2005). Consequently, this article engages with walking holidays through autobiographical insights, as explained in the methodological section of this article. How the walking touristscape and its place performances are enacted through a personal experience is analysed in the fourth section of this article. Touristscapes can be defined as performative assemblages of objects, bodies, environments, technology, and media (van der Duim, 2007) and they are achieved through socio-material repeated interaction (Edensor, 2009). By focusing on velocity, pace, and rhythm, mundane technology, and flowing and fleeting affective atmospheres, the article analyses social and material entanglements as they are produced and challenged in performances such as routing, immersive embodied performances and co-dwelling performances. The article concludes by suggesting that a ‘mobile ontology’ can not only provide a more thorough account of walking tourism, but can also highlight the importance of understanding the place-making potential of this kind of holidaying as a complex form of material and sociable ‘dwelling-in-motion’ for which both precognitive and cognitive implications should be considered.

Performing walking touristscapes

This article builds on existing work regarding walking holidays, defined as holidays where the ‘main motive is to walk for most days and for most of the day between accommodation points, either on a linear or circular route’ (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010b: 122). Walking holidays are increasingly promoted to the tourist market under the umbrella term ‘slow tourism’, that is, a form of tourism that encourages tourists to travel locally and reject motorised forms of transportation, such as air or automobile travel, in favour of less polluting modes of travel (Molz, 2009). The term has now become institutionalised and encompasses a diverse range of activities (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010a; Fullagar et al., 2012). Walking holidays can also be included in outdoor forms of tourism, such as endurance tourism (Lisle, 2016; Olafsdottir, 2013) as they require fitness and link the two consumer realms of sport and tourism, and adventure tourism, as they both may mingle risk and play (Kane, 2004; Weber, 2001). Walking tourism also intersects pilgrimage tourism, particularly when the latter is considered from a secular and post-secular viewpoint (Collins-Kreiner, 2010; Nilsson and Tesfahuney, 2018), given the transcendental meanings attributed not only to reaching a specific ‘sacred’, though not necessarily religious, destination but, even more importantly, to the journey and the ‘circulation’ itself. Among the aspects that remain under explored in studies of such on the move tourism practices are the sociable and material practices of journey-making. This paper focuses on these aspects.

Not only do walking holidays interact with other kinds of tourist patterns that have physical movement as their focus, they also comprise a variety of mobilities that inform tourist practice and also shape space and drive the making of tourist destinations. ‘Tourism mobilities involve complex combinations of movement and stillness, realities and fantasies, play and work’ (Sheller and Urry, 2004: 1), resulting in place performances that exceed representations and are created through practice and socio-material relationships. The metaphor of performance for discussing space and place dynamics has been influenced considerably by the works of tourism geographers (Bærenholdt et al., 2003; Chapuis, 2011; Coleman and Crang, 2002; Crouch, 2003; Edensor, 1998, 2001, 2007; Haldrup and Larsen, 2010) that also dialogued with the so-called ‘new mobilities paradigm’ or ‘mobilities turn’ in the Social Sciences and Humanities opened up by the works of Cresswell (2006), Sheller and Urry (2006) and Urry (2007). The ‘mobile ontology’ that is at the basis of the mobilities turn is simply defined as one in which ‘movement is primary as a foundational condition of being, space, subjects and power’ (Sheller, 2018: 9). Less orthodox than the position assumed by strictly vitalist humanities (Braidotti, 2013; Lorimer, 2009), research inscribed in the mobilities turn is more interested in looking at, and playing with, non-/more-than-representational theories while maintaining a nuanced tone with respect to a post-humanist positioning (Revill, 2016). Accordingly, tourist mobilities performances are considered as they emerge both from particular kinds of scripts and roles and from improvisation and reflexivity. In doing so they reproduce, but also exceed, established choreographies in which both human and non-human actors are involved. The embodied nature and experience of the different modes of travel are seen as ‘forms of material and sociable dwelling-in-motion’ or ‘places of and for various activities’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 214), including specific forms of talk, walks, information-gathering and maintaining a moving presence with others (ibid).

Within this perspective, walking is considered not only as a mode of transport or a leisure activity, but as one of the most archetypal ways of performing place through a range of leisure activities, including tourism. The way we walk, for leisure or for any other purpose, is informed by various performative norms and values that produce distinct practices and dispositions. Walking articulates a relationship between the walking subject and a place (Wylie, 2005). It involves a complex layering of material organisation and the shape of the landscape (Lorimer and Lund, 2003) with symbolic meaning and an ongoing sensual perception associated with the embodied experience of moving through space (Rose and Wylie, 2016).

Following Middleton’s (2011) review of different bodies of research addressing different dimensions associated with walking, the origin of walking studies can be traced to pedestrian policy and transport geography. While these studies produced data examining the frequency of walking, or the routes walked, they overlooked the significance of a journey made on foot, and the variety of ways of walking that exist (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008). With specific reference to tourism studies, little work exists concerning the experience of transportation (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010b). Therefore, while a cultural and qualitative account of transportation emerged following the success of the mobilities turn (Merriman, 2013; Shortell and Brown, 2014; Watts, 2008), tourism studies appear not to have seriously undertaken a qualitative analysis of the experience of transportation in the context of tourism.

A second point concerns walking as an embodied performance in urban public spaces, a view inspired by the seminal works of Jacobs (1961) and de Certeau (1980). A ‘romantic gaze’ regarding walking is said to have originated in this tradition, as it considers walking to be an emancipatory practice (Middleton, 2011). This involves sidelining the constrictions to which pedestrian experiences are subject, both from an implicit and explicit normative point of view, and from a human physical point of view (see also Macpherson, 2016). However, this romanticism is not unique to the literature concerning the agentic potential of pedestrianism in urban space. With other nuances, a similar romanticism regarding walking is common in the analysis of rural performances, such as that denounced by Crouch (2006), Edensor (2000), and Wylie (2005). For instance, the early work of Edensor (2000) analysed how the British countryside has been presented in both literary works and the activities of networks such as the British Walking Federation, and their communication materials. These materials are performative in the way they suggest norms that are then subsumed while walking. The rhetoric of the guide books for leisure walkers, as well as a variety of other sources, including works of art and poetry, often articulates a kind of rural/urban dichotomy, one that is particularly problematic and untenable in scientific terms (Woods, 2009, 2010). In this context, Michael (2000) stressed how the ‘pure’ encounter with nature that is, for instance, at the core of discourses of rural performances is actually mediated by mundane technologies, such as boots, that are rendered invisible by the walking romantic gaze. Hall et al. (2018) posit that walking has developed as a commodity, with the associated development of commercial products such as specialist clothing, walking and fitness aids, as well as walking holidays and walking trails. Indeed, the environment in tourism is encountered as a bodily movement and the instant response to socio-material artefacts whose affordability in the context of the experience also concerns mental engagement and the development of skills related to certain technologies (Lorimer and Lund, 2003) such as walking poles, maps, global positioning systems (GPS), and cameras, to cite only the most common, even if these are not often perceived as ‘mediators’ between humans and the environment.

A third aspect of this subject concerns the consideration of walking as a form of art, including performances in the vein of psychogeography and flânerie. This stream of research has often employed walking to explore issues that are wider than simply walking itself (Middleton, 2011). The work of Wylie (2005) is a notable exception in bridging this gap, as his study employed walking as both poetics and a methodology to investigate issues of landscape, subjectivity, and corporeality. For Wylie (ibid., p. 240), walking can be interpreted as an embodied connection that is not ‘foreign or resistant to the knowledges produced by gazing, contemplating and navigating’, but that also allows for engaging with walking travels away from oculocentrism. In delineating walking in this way, Wylie (ibid.) provided an understanding of walking as a mobility practice itself, from an embodied, performative, non-/more-than-human perspective.

It is apparent from this literature that certain concepts can be isolated to provide a framework to better understand the enactment of walking holidays and to explore how they are entangled and disentangled through place performances.

(My own) body moving: (Personal) walking as a method

Walking has long been recognised as a mobility practice that includes both aesthetic spatial enactments and the material transformation of bodies and environments and which can also become a research instrument (Careri, 2006; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Wylie, 2005). In walking, pre-cognition and cognition are combined through locomotion; this means that walking can also represent a mode of attending to research (Wylie, 2005) connecting what was previously referred to as mobile ontology with mobile epistemologies and methodologies.

This epistemological and methodological positioning was not explicit at the outset of my walking holiday, undertaken in June 2018. Rather, the mode of the holiday was a personal choice. I intended to walk with my partner from our home, on the outskirts of the Milanese metropolitan area, to my father’s home in a village in the Italian Alps, 100 km (62 miles) away. This had implications that are mentioned below.

First, I did not take a field-diary with me, and neither did I adopt any other research-motivated data recording strategy. Therefore, the observations presented in this article are based on a personal a-posteriori reading of what remained of my walking experience, both in the form of memories, and as involuntary memos, such as for instance the pictures on my smartphone, or informal conversations with my partner who walked with me. I had likely always known, at least subconsciously, that this trip would have a clear link to the fact that I am also a researcher in tourism geography, with a specific focus on performative approaches (Rabbiosi, 2016a, 2016b, 2018). This was evident during the trip, as I started observing and analysing my own performance, and also immediately after the trip, as I reported it to friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, the report presented in this article is based on a walk primarily experienced as a holiday, rather than as a piece of observant participation fieldwork, as in the case, for instance, of Olafsdottir (2013). My trip was not interrupted by pauses to collect data, or to record reflective notes, rather I was simply immersed in my ‘present’ holidaying persona.

The second implication connects with the sensuous, material, and performative characteristics of the ‘walked’. Generally, I perform the trip in question by car or train, which takes approximately 2 hours, whereas on this occasion, it took 5 days, and a certain amount of effort, due to a series of ‘up and downs’ involved, which included reaching a peak with an elevation of 2554 m (8379 ft). While my whole body would inevitably be involved in the journey from Milan to Mellarolo, regardless of when I performed the trip or the mode of transport employed, the sense of sight would be the preeminent sense at work as I looked out of the window while using a form of transport, such as a car or a train. Walking, however, allowed, or forced, me to expose my body to the trip in a different way, engaging senses diversely, entangling my own performance with the environment and with other presences (or absences) along the way in a different way from the way I had previously experienced and moulding place performances in specific manners by a variety of shifting socio-material relationships, as the analytical section of this article will demonstrate.

The third implication concerns the fact that I performed this walk with a second person, namely my partner. As Edensor (2010) observed, walking with another individual adds flows to the flowing affective atmospheres involved. It is possible to connect with another individual whilst walking if you attune to them, developing a sort of synchronicity. If this attunement is not achieved, walking with that individual can quickly create a sense of being out of sync, and uncomfortable. This article is an analysis of my own performance, as I did not formally involve my partner in this auto-ethnographic account, although the fact that two of us were involved in the trip, each with different walking backgrounds and levels of physical fitness, inevitably influenced the entire walking performance.

Auto-ethnography serves the double aim of providing a method of data collection, and a mode of analysis that stresses the role of emotions, situated knowledge and perception (Moss, 2001; Purcell, 2009). It is argued that focusing on a self-centred perspective favours contact with feelings and emotions that could not be otherwise expressed. Therefore, Noy (2008: 143) suggested that ‘auto-ethnographising our tourist experiences’ reveals that ‘there is more, indeed much more, to the sphere of tourist experience than leisurely experiences or other types of positive experiences’, as the rhetoric of tourism generally contends. Moreover, employing personal experiences can also be seen as a way to engage in ‘an ethology of relational experience through which one learns to affect and be affected by variations in the relational ‘tissue of experience’’ (McCormack, 2010: 217), in line with a non-/more-than-representational approach.

In the following sections, I refer to my own performance as a form of ‘dwelling-in-motion’ enacting a walking touristscape. In order to address this walking touristscape, a number of specific performances are referred to, namely routing performances, immersive bodily performances, and co-dwelling performances. These three performances are employed as empirical ‘entry points’; namely the more or less self-evident, easily observable phenomena or objects around which it is possible to commence the collection and discussion of data. They were chosen to illustrate how ‘mobile’ they are, even if they initially appear to be static and also because a long-distance holiday encompasses mobility as much as it encompasses immobility. Velocity, pace, rhythmicity, mundane technological mediations, and ‘affective atmospheres’ are present in all three of the performances discussed. For the purposes of the analysis, each is the focus of one of three specific subsections.

Performing a walking holiday

Routing performances

Routing performances are discussed as the product and the producer of diverse velocities, paces, and rhythms, concerning both goal-oriented and accidental movement and navigation across surfaces. During our trip (Figure 1), my partner and I routed along a variety of routes, ranging from urban roads, characterised by pedestrian pavements, car lanes and city centre commercial areas, to peri-urban service roads bordered only by logistics or manufacturing buildings and sandy service roads crossing fields and wastelands, which were definitely not designed for a leisure activity such as the one we were undertaking. We also walked along specifically-designed cycle and pedestrian paths explicitly marked for so-called slow tourism, as well as mountain trails. And we also walked on a variety of connecting routes that were difficult to classify and which became vectors only because we routed through them and thereby produced them as routes in our performance.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

(a) Synthesis of the daily schedule of my walking trip, (b) The itinerary of my walking trip, and (c) Elevation profile of my walking trip.

We commenced our walking holiday on a peri-urban road, close to the centre of a town in the outskirts of the metropolitan area of Milan; ¹ the door of our home opens onto this road. From the windows of our bedroom, I can generally hear the velocity and rhythms typical of this road, as they are marked by the sound of motorized vehicles passing along it. As it is a road outside the city centre, deprived of shop windows and other socializing consumer facilities, it is the kind of road that is generally not walked for pleasurable reasons, rather it is walked in a monotonous rhythm, and at a cruising speed. Commencing our walking holiday from this location, and making it part of our personal walking touristscape, we walked methodically on the pavement, conforming our trajectories to the space in which they were permitted to be enacted, and attuning ourselves to the regular rhythms of the cars passing by. There was no a-rhythmicity, due to pausing to take pictures, or other similar practices common to a holiday; rather, we proceeded as usual.

Later that day, we became more aware of the pace of our routing, as in the afternoon, after walking through a wasteland on a service road, we found ourselves at an impassable barrier, composed of different sets of large, metallic, horizontal railings, and heavy plastic fences. We had encountered a highway, but had done so in a manner other than we would normally. It was therefore an ‘extraordinary’ encounter, in the sense that we were rarely in such close proximity to such a form of infrastructure on foot. Concurrently, it retained something of a very ordinary encounter, considering the density of the infrastructure in the area. The Milanese metropolitan area is characterized by heavy land consumption, including the dense presence of logistical and transport infrastructure. The character of that encounter was marked by a difference in our velocity, and that of the traffic on the highway that we could hear, see, and physically perceive, since we were close to the traffic lanes.

Another episode that serves to illuminate the issues of velocity, pace, and rhythmicity and issues of time occurred on Day 3 of the journey, as we kept missing our intended route. At the time, we were walking on a walking trail in a more bucolic area than the suburban district described previously. However, we kept losing our way, because of poor way-marking. Sometimes, we realized we were on the wrong path only after having walked for an extensive distance. In line with Wylie’s observation (2005), the more we lost our way, the less I was able to experience the ‘sublime nature’ of the rural environment I was encountering. In retrospect, my frustration was not dissimilar to that I sometimes experience in large cities when I get lost, or I am deviated from my route, due to, for instance, building work. I cannot then proceed as fast as I had initially planned, and find it hard to accept the need to slow down. If I have to return to my point of departure, I consider that I have ‘lost time’. Indeed, velocity is linked to issues of time and timing, and walking tourism is not abstracted from concerns and issues related to the velocity-time nexus. In the context of the holiday, I feared not being able to reach our final destination before the natural light had faded, and did not want to still be in the woods once darkness fell. Since, on a walking trip, one cannot return to one’s point of departure quickly because of the frictions that walking entails, the stress caused when we got lost was greater than that caused when I lost my way in other situations.

Immersive embodied performances

My walking holiday comprised a variety of immersive embodied encounters with the natural environment mediated by a set of technologies that we would not normally consider. A case in point, showing how our bodies become entangled with the natural environment via mundane technologies, occurred when we came across way-markers and directional signs. In the weeks before departing for our walking holiday, my partner spent a couple of days researching the route through the typical infrastructural labyrinth that characterizes many peri-urban areas, including that in which we live. In so doing, he engaged in mapping in a performative way (Caquard, 2015; Kitchin and Dodge, 2007), namely by collating knowledge from his previous spatial experience of the area, and the brand new embodied discovery practice. This performance comprised locative analogical and digital tools, such as Google Maps. Google Maps, and a variety of other GPS-based programmes, have become some of the most common invisible forms of technology that currently mediate human-environment relationships, as one seeks to orientate and navigate physical space. In our case, however, we preferred to rely on a hand-sketched map, ‘making space’ for us in the peri-urbanity. One reason for this was that we considered it safer, in case our phone discharged, or there was no phone signal. Also, we wanted to avoid having to check our phone screens continuously, as this would have impacted on our posture, as well as on our cognitive disposition. Returning to an ‘old-style’ of technology to find our way may also be considered an example of our particular ‘romantic’ disposition towards walking tourism; a way to engage with the experience by becoming immersed in it through certain objects. However, at a certain point on Day 1, we realized that we had lost our map. We were entering a sparsely built and sporadically populated area, although it was not entirely a rural idyll, where way-markers were absent, as the space had not yet been ‘normalized’ (Edensor, 2000) for walking tourists.

Together with maps, way-markers and directional signs are significant additional forms of mundane technology encountered on a walking trip. On Day 3 of our trip, as we began walking uphill, we followed the signs indicating a new trekking path created by the Rotary Club ‘from the heart of Brianza ² to Switzerland on foot’. ³ The way-markers along this route had been planted as the result of one of many projects initiated on the occasion of the Milan Expo 2015, with the aim of making the wider region, beyond the city, more appealing in tourism terms. However, once we began walking the route, we realized the path was marked only in one direction, that contrary to our own. This unexpected event significantly affected our performance when encountering the woods, the grass, the flowers, and the sky around us. On several occasions, we could not understand in which direction we should be walking. Looking back, I recall reacting with some initial amusement. To address this shortcoming, we opted for explicitly playing, in an embodied way, with the directional signs. When we came across a sign pointing towards us, instead of in the direction we had been walking, one of us would stand in the place of the way-marker, personifying it. The other would walk towards it from all directions except the one from which we had come. What was the rationale for how the directional sign had been placed? From which point was the marker thought to be more easily visible? That direction was the one we should have taken.

Ultimately, the absence of directional signs and way-markers significantly affected our walking trip. The more we walked to try and get back on the correct route, the more my feet troubled me. Although they were tightly encased within my hiking boots, that mundane technology epitomised by Michael (2000), I soon realized that blisters were probably forming on my feet, and I increasingly lamented the pain I was experiencing as a result. I began to cry, exhausting my partner, who shouted at me. The silence of the woods was broken, the quiet interrupted, the air was no longer fresh and stimulating but heavy and the general atmosphere was hostile. By this point, I was totally oblivious to the beauty of the wood around us. I was overjoyed when the trekking path led to a busy, motorised road and we were offered a lift. I asked the driver to take me straight to the nearest chemist, delighted to be in a context where such facilities existed and I commenced a diet based on a very technological product: ibuprofen.

A significant encounter with the natural environment occurred later the same day. When we arrived at the bed and breakfast (B&B) where we were to spend the night, the owner informed us that there was a spring at the rear of the house. We decided to plunge our bodies in the spring: feet, legs, arms and as many other parts of our bodies as possible, for as long as we could stand the freezing cold temperature of the flowing water. Immobile in such a mobile element as running water, after a long day of being on the move, I found physical and mental solace (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Im/mobility encounters: finding solace through immobility in a mobile element as running water after a long day of being on the move.

Conclusion

This article questioned the performance of walked touristscapes. In particular, it employed a mobile perspective, in the form of a 5-day personal walking holiday, in order to question current accounts of walking tourism, often marketed under the umbrella term of slow travel or slow tourism (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010b; Fullagar et al., 2012). Routing performances and their diverse rhythms, paces, and velocities, the embodied immersive encounters with the walked environments as they are enacted and mediated through mundane technologies, and co-dwelling mobile performances resulting from fleeting encounters with animals, other humans and, even, tourist representations, were analysed as key performances stabilising a walking touristscape.

This article calls for a ‘mobile ontology’ of tourism, drawing from the so-called mobilities turn (Hannam, 2008; Sheller and Urry, 2004), mingling the more phenomenological (e.g. Cresswell, 2006, 2010) and the more ‘post’-phenomenological or non-/more-than-representational (Lorimer, 2009) approaches applied to walking (e.g. Wylie, 2005). This nuanced positioning has enabled the consideration of how a walking holiday is assembled via ‘dwelling-in-motion’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 213, 214; see also Hannam and Roy, 2013), collating bodies, spaces, technologies, animals, objects, affects and emotions into a touristscape (Edensor, 2009; van der Duim, 2007).

This article demonstrated how enduring pedestrian movement is not only a mental journey or only an affective encounter but also a ‘coming-of-age’ process for the body, through which tourist walkers improve their bodily skills, kinaesthetic and orienteering knowledge in a changeable social and material spatial context. In so doing, places are also made through a form of travelling that includes diverse mobilities, paces and even immobilities. Human and non-human elements are entangled as the result of the embodied disposition of the walker, the walking terrain, and the distance involved (Macpherson, 2016), which I was able to comprehend using my own walking holiday as a point of reference. To connect to my second argument, I experienced a tiring tour, and often detour, both literally and metaphorically, as emerged in my wayfinding or ‘romantic wandering’ attempts, in so doing exceeding ready-to-consume representations of some walking tourism itineraries.

Using walking not only as something to be observed or analysed, but also as a fully legitimised methodology, proved to be a significant tool to help overcome common readings in tourism discourse. Whether academic or marketing oriented, such discourses too often create essentialised dichotomies in the form of opposing rhythms (irregular and creative vs regular and uncreative), velocities (slow vs fast), human-environment relationships (unmediated vs mediated) and atmospheres (solitary and silent vs crowded and noisy). Through my analysis, I demonstrated that these dichotomies are far from being neatly experienced or performed. For instance, I experienced regimented goal-oriented walking styles as well as (undesired) navigation without designed route. I also encountered a variety of possible frictions along the course of a walk, such as poor way-marking, or sore feet because of poorly-fitting boots that significantly affected my dwelling-in-motion. Furthermore, mundane technologies, such as the material a path is composed of, directional signs, or boots, significantly mark the way in which encounters with the environments are performed. These matters were discussed from the viewpoint of my observation of my own body’s movement. Other walkers may perform walking touristscapes in other ways, using other rhythms and velocities, according to their own embodied dispositions (see Macpherson (2016) on the importance of this point) or by employing technologies other than the ones I used. The results may emphasise different reactions to mine to affective atmospheres, such as frustrating bewilderment, or nearly ‘static’ solitude.

At the outset of this article, I claimed that few studies have demonstrated the benefit of non-/more-than-representational approaches to challenging walking tourism mobility performances. To address this current gap in the literature, I employed a personal experience of a walking holiday, recalled in the form of memories and a few unplanned notes. Despite the limits of subjectivity and the bias engendered by the lack of planned fieldwork materials, this personal experience enabled me to engage theoretically in order not to reach conclusions to be operationalized but rather to suggest how to deal with a more thoughtful account of walking tourism. The rigid positivist frameworks employed in tourism studies and planning often fail to grasp the complexity of phenomena as they occur in actuality. Ultimately, this article invites the consideration of more mobile and embodied accounts of such performances in order to support sounder, problem-oriented work.