This book starts slowly and then downshifts. In a preamble Mr. Armitage declares that writing a travelogue appealed to him because it could “encompass elements of memoir as well as saying something about my life as a poet.” But he tells us almost nothing about himself or his work in “Walking Home.” Mr. Armitage has a degree in geography, but he has little that’s crunchy to say on that topic, either.

His book is filled with physical but not mental exertion. Nothing is at stake; no real issues are hashed out. (If you want issues hashed out, and beautifully, read Cheryl Strayed’s hiking memoir, “Wild.”)

His prose, ordinarily winsome, can flatten out. Cows lumber “like big slow balloons.” This observation will not impress the editor of Best English Cow Writing 2013.

These small problems stem from a larger one. The English novelist Will Self, who is also a committed walker, recently noted that there are two primary types of walks. “The determining factor is not a walk’s length,” he said, “whether up hill or down dale, if it is sleeting or shining, but only accompanied/unaccompanied.”

Mr. Self added: “It is essential, for me at least, that I walk alone; only then can thought unspool from my arachnid mind and silkily entwine with the places I go.”

In “Walking Home” Mr. Armitage is almost never alone. “I’ve made a big song and dance about this venture, talked about it on the telly and the radio, written pieces for the papers, roped in dozens and dozens of volunteers to cart my bag and lay on events and give up their beds,” he writes. He delivers a reading each night and lives off the proceeds from passing a hat. His trek becomes a circus, a media-something.