Walking for fun was once a sign of poverty, until the Romantics changed that
For most of history, travelling on foot marked you as poor or a vagrant, unless you were a pilgrim. Only in 18th-century Europe, as Romantic attitudes to nature spread, did following a path for pleasure catch on. America's first purpose-built hiking trail, climbing Mount Washington, was cut in 1819.
A trail is a dirt or lightly paved route, usually through undeveloped country, meant for walkers, riders and non-motorised vehicles. Vocabulary shifts by place. Britons tend to say footpath and use legal terms like bridleway and byway, and their National Trails often carry the name way, as in the Pennine Way. New Zealanders say track or walkway, and in Alberta, oddly, multi-lane freeways are called trails. In the United States the word recalls westward routes such as the Oregon Trail.
Animals made the first trails, and people adapted them. Farmers drove cattle to market and between summer and winter pastures, and Alpine communities still move livestock this way. Great trade routes such as the Silk Road, the Amber Road and the Persian Royal Road predate the Christian era. The Post Track, a causeway in the Somerset Levels of England, dates from about 3838 BC and is among the oldest constructed trackways known. More recently, disused railway lines and canal towpaths have become recreational paths.
Abel Crawford and his son Ethan Allen blazed the Crawford Path in New Hampshire's White Mountains in 1819, probably the first path anywhere built for recreational hiking; it originally ran 8.25 miles and now runs 8.5. Early 20th-century auto trails were marked highway routes, and the word still labels scenic drives like Nova Scotia's Cabot Trail.
Many systems now segregate users, reserving routes for horses, bikes or walkers with signs, surfaces, ditches or fences. The rise of mountain biking has produced clusters of routes called trail centres, and off-road riding can erode soil on wet ground, though perhaps no more than other uses. Europe's EuroVelo network of 17 long-distance cycle routes, run by the European Cyclists' Federation, exceeded 90,000 kilometres by 2020, stitching together national networks such as the Dutch LF-Routes and Britain's National Cycle Network. Cross-country skiers use trails too, sometimes staying in networks of huts.
Source: Trail
