Walking the Hexagon by Terry Cudbird

Terry Cudbird, of the Oxford Ramblers, could have opted for a quiet life when he retired from a career as marketing director of WH Smith. But instead he decided to devise a 4,000-mile walk around France.

He admits that the project soon became an obsession. “I was never as happy as when I was poring over maps, calculating distances and making timetables. Having spent so much time creating detailed plans, I had to carry them out.”

It took him two years to complete, mostly in one-month stretches, returning to his home in Oxford or to visit his elderly parents, who both developed dementia while he was away.

Having studied French history as a student, he had absorbed some of the culture, but his journey allowed him to learn and reflect on the details that distinguish different French regions. This is all fascinating — particularly to anyone contemplating a long-distance walk in France — but the real interest lies in the way he turned his journey into a meditation on life, death, the universe, etc.

The book is based on the diary he kept, and accounts of adventurous scrambles in the Pyrenees or hair-raising ascents in the Alps are punctuated with his mobile-phone ringtone, and difficult news from home. His journey ends in Lourdes, with his mother confined to a wheelchair in a care home and his father — who once jumped down the scree of Great Gable — also in a home. He says his escape around France kept him sane and opened up new perspectives. “The slow rhythm of walking was like a silent meditation, through which I gradually became reconciled to the past and its loss.”

l Another way of journeying through France is described in France on Two Wheels by travel journalist Adam Ruck. He and his friend Paul are serious cyclists (100 miles a day) but stay in comfortable hotels and have long, relaxed meals with several courses. As you would expect, the book is filled with serious gobbets of information and history, plus a useful appendix for cycle planning.