Walking is simple, free and one of the easiest ways to get more active, lose weight and become healthier. As Hippocrates stated, “walking is man's best medicine”. Regular and longer walks not only increase your chances of living longer, but also help you get more energy, lose weight, stay healthy and positive. From walking round the block, a short amble to get your morning newspaper to group rambles for health, leisure and friendship. Whatever walking you decide to do, walking is a simple, cost effective and easy way and means of getting around for people of all ages, backgrounds and levels of fitness. And it can be done anywhere. Travelling by foot is also meditative as it fosters a slowness of thought, as you become more aware of your surroundings. It rocks.

Here at LoveReading we have collected a list of books that celebrate walking. In Walking, an ode to walking from one of the world's leading explorers, we find a book about the love of exploration, the delight of discovery and the equilibrium that can be found in this most simple of activities. 

From those perilous first steps as a toddler, to great expeditions, from walking to work to trekking to the North Pole, Erling Kagge explains that he who walks goes further and lives better. 

Wanderers by Kerry Andrews delivers a beguiling view of the history of walking, guiding us through the different ways of seeing - of being - articulated by ten pathfinding women.

Over the past three hundred years these trailblazing women have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter - who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England - to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. 

We can't curate a collection about nature and walking without including something from the nature writer of all nature writers. Robert Macfarlane has the most incredible way of immersing you in his world, through his beautiful writing, his magnificent observations and and his unique sense of place. In The Old Ways Macfarlane follows the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond. By his side, you will discover a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations. 

If you're looking for ways to walk, you must check out Annabel Streets 52 Ways to Walk where she explains the latest science behind each one, and provides practical tips for making the most of your daily steps. It's a revelatory and informative handbook for anyone stuck in a walking rut, curious about the lesser-known benefits of walking or merely in need of some on-foot novelty and adventure.

If you're looking for routes to walk, you should check out Britain's Best Walks by The Times which is one of the must-have books to discover the best of Britain's walks. Christopher Somerville has covered the length and breadth of the UK on foot, and has written and broadcast about its history, landscape, wildlife and people for over 25 years. Now, in this extensive new volume, he selects his top 200 routes from his hugely popular Times column, A Good Walk.

Kids in tow? 100 Great Walks With Kids is an attractive and inspiring guidebook for all families wanting to make the most of the great outdoors. This collection of 100 walks is spread out across the country which make it the ideal staycation companion for families. Graded for difficulty, every page turned brings a new map, great photographs, a written overview and a new adventure!

In Merryn Glover's Hidden Fires, you will find a truly inspiring and beautiful book about the Cairngorm mountains, our natural world, and beyond.

Anita Sethi gives us a beautiful, important, and inspiring exploration of our natural world and the author’s sense of belonging within her own country in I Belong Here.The journalist and writer decided to hike the ‘backbone of Britain’ The Pennines after she was the victim of a vicious race-hate crime.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn is a fascinating, inspirational, eye-opening biography about a couple who walk the 630-mile South West Coastal Path. But beware, it's not all a bed of roses. The synopsis sounds heartbreaking, it is heartbreaking, yet this is one of the most positive and hopeful memoirs we have read. After a three year trial Raynor and husband Moth lose their home and livelihood then within days Moth is informed he is terminally ill. Hiding under the stairs with the bailiffs at the door Raynor and Moth decide to wild walk the coastal path around the south west of England. The Salt Path was shortlisted for the 2018 Costa Biography Award and the hardback was a Times Top 10 bestseller, all deservedly so.

A similar path from lost to found is delivered in Cheryl Strayed's Wild. At twenty-six, with nothing to lose, Strayed made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state - and to do it alone. 

In Unequivocal, the title of Jaco van Gass' book is a reference to ‘unequivocal saves’ which was a term used at the military hospital where he was treated for life-changing injuries in 2009. The ‘unequivocals’ were those who the hospital had undoubtedly brought back from the brink and their names were listed on the wall alongside another board that recorded the less fortunate. With his left arm gone following a firefight in Afghanistan, and with injuries that would be enough to retire most of us, van Gass steps up to become a first class mountaineer and world record holding Paralympic cyclist, not to mention being a team member of the Walking with the Wounded expedition that reached the North Pole in 2011.

Going further afield into the realms of Everest, we adored Silvia Vasquez-Lavado's In The Shadow of the Mountain. This incredible story just blew us away with it's beautifully written words and inspirational story of triumph through adversity. What a journey it was to becoming one of the first women in the world to climb the Seven Summits.

What are your favourite books on walking? Share them with us.