My best commute was a field trip

Back in the car, Will Gore misses the month when getting to work involved an early-morning hike to the station

The view from Ivinghoe Beacon overlooking the Chiltern Hill (Rex Features )

I enjoy my job. When the alarm pings at 6am I don’t feel an awakening dread about the day to come. When I leave the house at 7.15am, frequently at a run in an effort to catch my train, I’m often thinking about the (mostly) interesting tasks ahead of me at the office.

And yet as I approach Berkhamsted station I am tempted – every day – not to board the 7.26 to Kensington. Instead, I think to myself, I could turn right at the car park entrance, bear left under the railway line, pass the ruins of Berkhamsted Castle and within 10 minutes be in the wooded expanse of the Ashridge Estate, striding across the Chilterns (presumably in my suit).

I find the pull of the countryside ever-more intense. But the desire to skip past the station is also about simply wanting to move my limbs. I spend nearly two hours a day sitting on trains, tubes or buses; and usually another 10 in The Independent and Evening Standard’s offices, mostly hunkered at my desk. Olden-day tales of people walking miles each day to work or school are supposed to be indicators of how far we’ve advanced – to me they sound blissful.

In April, I had my chance. Building works had forced us out of our house and into a short-term let 15 minutes’ drive away, near the village of Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire. The closest station was Tring – five minutes in the car but a tempting distance to travel on foot.

When I first mooted the possibility that I might walk those three-and-a-half miles my wife rolled her eyes – not unreasonably, perhaps. But I knew that when our daughter returned from a week with her grandparents the plan would not be feasible – so it was now or never.

The keep and remains of the defensive wall at Berkhamsted Castle which was constructed in 1066 (Rex Features ) (Rex Features)

On Monday morning I packed my suit into a rucksack, pulled on my boots and a raincoat and slipped out at 6.15am as the sun was threatening to rise. We were staying in a cottage on a working farm and I had already discovered a little-used path running down to the village. It skirted the edge of the now disused and heavily overgrown farm reservoir, and plunged me briefly into a small wood filled with birdsong.

A brief trudge by the side of the road was pleasing only because it gave me a chance to look sympathetically at the poor souls who were journeying by car. As they carried on their way I turned south-east across fields and began the gradual ascent of the line of hills along which the ancient Ridgeway runs towards its eastern end at Ivinghoe Beacon.

Sometimes described as Britain’s oldest road, The Ridgeway’s 90 miles have been covered by travellers for at least 5,000 years and probably longer. It became a National Trail in 1972 – one of 15 around the country – and is managed by the National Trust. If I hadn’t needed to catch the 7.22, I might have reached Avebury, at its western end, by the end of the week.

I arrived at the top of the ridge a mile or so south of the Beacon. At that point the chalky hills are open to the elements, grassed but unwooded. To the north, the view was clear across the wide Vale of Aylesbury, but to the south, in a dip between The Ridgeway and further hills beyond, mist was hanging, silver where the morning sun clipped its wilder edges. Ahead was a man out walking his dog, a collie, and I passed them when they paused for breath next to a gnarly hawthorn.

The way stretched ahead, clearly marked by boot-worn grass with the brilliant chalk showing through in places. I love those moments on a country walk when you come upon a perfect stretch of pathway. So many of them are etched in my memory: from Biggin Dale in the Peak District, to the Five Sisters of Kintail and dozens of others. For years I had a clear recollection of a path in the Yorkshire Dales but little memory of why I had been there, who I had been with or even exactly where it was. Hours of searching Google Earth and I realised it was a narrow gorge called Conistone Dib, a few miles from Grassington. I still don’t know when exactly I went there, though.

Physical paths are obvious metaphors for life, of course, though I find myself as intrigued by those which lead pretty much nowhere as those which set me in the right direction. Likewise, I am fascinated by the paradox presented by most maps – they open myriad options for exploration, yet are constrained by their edges. The glory of any Ordnance Survey map is imagining not only where it might take you, but also what lies beyond its borders.

Owned by the National Trust, the Ashridge Estate produces a truly stunning display of Bluebells (Rex Features ) (Rex Features)

The Ridgeway soon threads its way into the ancient beech hanger woodland of Aldbury Nowers, and a woodpecker was hard at work as I quickened my pace, realising that the hour I had allotted to reach the station was maybe optimistic. A walker heading the other way trilled a breezy "good morning", a signifier of the shared bond of the hiker community in which Nikwax, pints of mild and wind-chapped ears are common currency.

Lambs bleated merrily in unseen fields to my right but their encouragement was inadequate. I missed my train by a good 10 minutes, which was irritating – but at least allowed for a little de-sweating before stumbling on board the next arrival with several hundred other commuters, all more suitably attired than me.

Through the course of the week that followed I made the trek, in one direction or the other, on four more occasions. Each time I tried a slightly different route. On a dank Friday evening I trudged along the towpath of the Grand Union Canal: it was dank, muddy and, all around me, extraordinarily green. Even the water of the canal was a deep khaki. I didn’t see a living soul but listened to robins and blackbirds shouting the odds and did my best to avoid slipping into the water. By the time I got back to Ivinghoe, passing close by the 17th-century Pitstone Windmill, which emerged suddenly from the drizzle and gloaming, it was well beyond dusk.

My final walk came the next day as I headed to my mother-in-law’s home in Ely, Cambridgeshire, to meet my wife, who had driven there on Friday. The weather had become increasingly chilly in recent days and the sky was overcast. Sheep shivered and the skylarks, so jaunty earlier in the week, kept defiantly schtum. Sure enough, as I climbed the ridge for the last time, the snow came – never sufficient to settle, but more than enough to make me question whether it was really the middle of April.

Yet on this cold, snowy Saturday morning, the hills were alive with people: groups of schoolchildren on Duke of Edinburgh expeditions; ramblers in groups or alone; dog-walkers; and occasionally trainer-clad hopefuls who would soon be thinking better of it all. None of them was walking to work of course. But for a few days that week, I had done just that. I felt invigorated, healthy and had become a part of my surroundings rather than just an onlooker.

I’m back home in Berkhamsted now. And the temptation to skip past the station into the hills is ever-more difficult to ignore.