麻豆社

Aside from the exercise, can walking help you to think clearly? There is no shortage of writers who have drawn inspiration from their daily stroll.

Claire Tomalin, biographer of keen walkers Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen, told Today: "I love walking. I find it absolutely thrilling to walk along the Thames where Pepys walked".

"You see the sky and the river in the same way that your subject did".

Iain Sinclair, an author and filmmaker who does the same walk every morning, said: "I walk for 40 minutes every morning before I start working, as a kind of mediation between the state of sleeping and the state of waking."

First broadcast Today programme 16 January 2015.