Six weeks after my daughter was born, I found myself on the packed dirt path that runs along the River Cam in Grantchester Meadows. It was seven in the morning and cold. Frost lined every blade of grass, and my breath made clouds in front of me. But it was a bright, sunny day. After weeks of settling into motherhood indoors – unceasing night feeds, tears, and exhaustion – a walk in the sun seemed like the best possible thing to do.

It’s not that I hadn’t been outside in all that time. Most days I’d only gone as far as the end of my neighbourhood, on short strolls to give the baby some fresh air. Before parental leave, I’d been busy in my job as a nature and travel writer, often taking long walks in the name of work – and, if I was honest, I really missed it. I hadn’t felt that feeling of really walking for a while: warmth in my legs, a building momentum, the repetition of each step beneath my feet. And I knew that I needed to feel, and do, something for me.

Walking was a way of connecting with places, a means of transportation. I didn’t often think of it as exercise. And I rarely considered, though I often felt its impact, what it did for my mental health.

Studies of walking’s benefits date back to the 1950s, with the last decade of research preoccupied with the rise of “10,000 steps a day” challenges and the use of pedometers and activity trackers. What they tell us is that while all these tools urge us towards lofty step counts, there isn’t exactly a magic number to achieve. The figure 10,000 was dreamed up as part of a 1960s pedometer marketing campaign in Japan, and a recent study indicates that half that amount can be beneficial, with a plateau in benefits after about 7,500 steps. The NHS advises that just 10 minutes of brisk walking daily makes a difference. For an activity many of us do daily without thinking, this seems remarkable, but it’s estimated that when walking over half our body’s muscle mass is engaged. And the benefits of even a moderate pace – around three miles an hour – range from improved cardiovascular health, like lower blood pressure, to better glucose metabolism, musculoskeletal health, and mental wellbeing.

However, researchers distinguish between the passive steps we take going about our lives doing things like food shopping and errands (termed “secondary purpose walking”) and the act of actually going for a walk, which was the thing I really missed. On a walk, when we’ve laced our boots a bit more intentionally, the benefits reach beyond a bit of exercise, and where we choose to walk can make a big difference.

There is a growing swathe of research to back up the idea that being in nature improves not simply mental but physical health. Most studies highlight a 1984 study by Roger Ulrich, a professor of healthcare architecture who examined whether hospital patients with a view of nature recovered faster, and better, than those who didn’t. Ulrich’s research transformed how we think about healthcare settings and urban environments: the hospital where I gave birth, for example, boasted online that birthing patients could look out onto, or even walk in, the building’s pleasant courtyard sensory garden. We could labour with a view.

But as the contemporary American philosopher, Arnold Berleant, argues, it is when we’re actually moving through a landscape, rather than treating it simply as scenery, that we most fully connect with a place and ignite all our senses. Berleant uses the term “aesthetic engagement”, but it needn’t be quite so lofty: A walk along the river might count, or perhaps time spent practising shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), really attending to the details of the trees, the leaves, the smells and the sounds.

Over the past 20 years, research into the benefits of this kind of outdoor exercise has boomed: looking at the impact of, say, free gyms in parks or the improvement to learning outcomes for students walking in the woods. In one of the earliest studies, researchers in 2005 found that while walking or jogging improved blood pressure and mental health, viewing pleasant rural and urban scenes while doing so had a better impact on wider health and self-esteem than exercising on its own.

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Many studies after this replicated this laboratory model when assessing the impact of nature on our health but, in 2018, a study of walkers in Iceland took its research out of the lab setting. The benefits of walking outdoors were compared to simply viewing a video of nature while walking on a treadmill or being sedentary while watching nature. It concluded that when facing periods of stress, walking outdoors had the most impact on wellbeing, while under circumstances of profound and ongoing stress, simply resting and looking at nature did the trick. So we know that there are different and measurable benefits between simply looking at a scene and walking out into it.

I honestly don’t like to admit to thinking about walking as a “nature cure”. “Going for a walk might help me feel better!” feels like such a simple and transactional way to describe what, to me, has always been a richer experience than just a bit of exercise.

But the 2005 study pointed to a crucial condition about how nature impacts us: the quality of the place where this “green exercise” occurred made a difference to the results. They found that walkers who viewed unpleasant scenes of degradation and pollution – what the authors termed “threats to the countryside” – experienced a negative impact on their mental wellbeing. A 2014 study found that time spent engaging with scenes of natural beauty improved people’s connection to nature. So walking in nature, you might say, is linked to actually caring about it.

Current social sciences research indicates that time spent in nature contributes to what researchers call “pro-environmental behaviours” or PEBs. Listening to birdsong, watching the sunrise – indeed, all things you might do if going for a walk – might actually make you more likely to advocate for local wildlife conservation, more likely to recycle, and to vote for greener policies and politicians. Of course, we can’t ignore that some, when taking to the trails unprepared or irresponsibly, may have a detrimental impact: it’s hard to forget the scenes of rubbish left behind in the Lake District during lockdown or reports of those who required rescue after hill walking unprepared.

Despite these outliers, I’ve found walking in nature connects us to the notion of community: not just amongst our neighbours, but amongst the other species who share the local environment. Our planet is in the throes of climate breakdown: as Britain’s coast is threatened by rising sea levels and mountain trails across Europe and elsewhere are seasonally engulfed in flames, walking is a small way of forging connection with the natural world. You won’t protect what you don’t care about, the adage goes, and I care deeply about the places I walk.

Walking, we shouldn’t forget, must never be disentangled from its history as civil disobedience and protest. From the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass for the right to roam to this April’s Kinder in Colour trespass led by walkers of colour, we are reminded that not everyone has the same level of access to the natural world, and that such access remains something we must fight for. Online, groups like Black Girls Hike and Indigenous Women Hike show us that while walking can be celebratory and full of joy, it is always political. As a pastime, walking is less plagued by calls to beat our personal bests, to one-up each other as we Sunday stroll between the stiles and hedgerows. When we walk, we can resist the urge to constantly be productive, even in our downtime. Never on a walk have I thought I needed to be pushing harder, and these are all reasons why I love it.

But for all the data on the benefits of walking in nature, and for all the grand reasons why I think walking matters, I find myself coming back to a simple idea. Walking clears my mind of busy thoughts, each step forming a rhythm to quietly think with. It brings my attention to my body and to the ground beneath my feet. It is in movement that I feel most like myself and that I most like myself. That day I took a walk by the Cam, I needed to be reminded of it.

I walked half the way to Grantchester, breathing in the cold and letting the pale sun warm my skin. And then I turned back at an arbitrary point on the path. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere in particular. Rather, as the writer Rebecca Solnit once wrote in Wanderlust, walking was “both a means and an end, travel and destination”.

Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J Lee (Virago)