80s childrens / YA books about walking / rambling in the UK?
October 31, 2018 10:29 PM Subscribe
I'm trying to remember some books I read as a child in the late 70s or early 80s. They were always from the UK, and gave advice about enjoying their seemingly boundless rights to put on an old army jumper and an anorak, grab a map or a compass, and walk wherever they bloody well pleased.
They gave advice about what to take, and how to read a map / compass, make a simple shelter from a ground sheet, identify birds and mushrooms and berries, read the weather and so on. They often had colour photographs of a mop-headed youth with a backpack standing in some misty Arthurian glade gazing intently at grid references, their parents presumably on the other side of the country, but there were plenty of diagrams as well.
I don't think they were published by Usborne, but if you're familiar with their 70s / 80s kids offerings (particularly those about espionage), then these were the sort of thing kids who read those books would also read. As a child growing up in dusty rural Australian towns and getting lectured about strangers locking me up in abandoned refrigerators it seemed absolutely extraordinary that somebody my age could say 'thanks for breakfast, mum, I'm off to walk across Wales' and just do it.
They gave advice about what to take, and how to read a map / compass, make a simple shelter from a ground sheet, identify birds and mushrooms and berries, read the weather and so on. They often had colour photographs of a mop-headed youth with a backpack standing in some misty Arthurian glade gazing intently at grid references, their parents presumably on the other side of the country, but there were plenty of diagrams as well.
I don't think they were published by Usborne, but if you're familiar with their 70s / 80s kids offerings (particularly those about espionage), then these were the sort of thing kids who read those books would also read. As a child growing up in dusty rural Australian towns and getting lectured about strangers locking me up in abandoned refrigerators it seemed absolutely extraordinary that somebody my age could say 'thanks for breakfast, mum, I'm off to walk across Wales' and just do it.
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by crocomancer at 2:02 AM on November 1, 2018