Although writerly wandering is popularly associated with the left, and not just in England, it is not necessarily so. Irrespective of interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry, German writing about walking since Romanticism has traversed the full political spectrum. Heidegger used a walk along a country path (Feldweg) to define thinking, Denken, as a meditative release from the functions of representation or intention. Although he is careful to say that his conception of thought is not a complacency that just goes with the flow (as it were), it is fair to characterise his philosophy as radically ontological. That is to say, Heidegger’s philosophy is about being in the world, and is less concerned with how we can change it than with understanding how we are within it. Indeed, Heidegger’s ideal of change in the world would concern our authentic, abstract relation of being in it, not specific societal structures. In this sense, Heidegger’s thinking could be considered conservative. Of course, Heidegger was much more extreme in his actual politics than any legitimate conservative: he was complicit in the Nazi regime, and antisemitic. We cannot pin his day-to-day political positions onto his abstract philosophy in any straightforward way, nor onto his walks in the German forest. But the point stands that writerly wandering is not a preserve of the left. Writerly wandering is not well-described as activism, then, as my critically-minded colleagues would have it, some of them immersed in French theories of the flâneur. But we can say that writing about walking is necessarily an observation on our own place in nature and culture — or nature as culture. On that, all our authors from Rousseau onwards would agree.