Walking all day
For most of our history and all of our prehistory, walking or running would have been a big part of all of our lives. Our feet were made for walking and our souls for roaming free.
Today, all day, we’ll be on our roaming feet heading as far north as we can from well before dawn until dusk or bust.
The conquering Romans paced their marching routes in miles. A thousand (mille) paces gave the mile its name. Each roman pace was set at five roman feet from the point a heel leaves the ground to where it lands again. Legs and feet grew longer and today’s standard “land” mile grew too.
Our planned route to Cambridge, today takes us one hundred kilometres, that’s over 60 statute miles to cover by midnight.
Counting steps was not much use at sea, (unless the sea was frozen as more used to be), but degrees of latitude were easy to measure by checking the height of the sun at noon or the “pole” star at night. On the open ocean, if you kept your bearings and stayed on your latitude, you were sure to keep going in the same direction and eventually reach land. If you lost your sextant and your bearings you risked circling around until you ran out of water or hit some rocks hidden below the waves. Sailors stretched their sea legs and made “nautical” miles, conveniently equivalent to one sixtieth of a degree of latitude. On our green and pleasant land today, sixty “nautical” miles north would take us one whole degree of “latitude” further up away from the sun towards the north pole.
The pole star gave sailors latitude but it took time, and an accurate seafaring clock, to measure it, and give them longitude. We will be walking north along the meridian that got its name from the work of scientists up on the hill at Greeenwich desperately searching for more accurate ways to make life safer on the high seas.
Even if we stand still all day, we will travel 360 degrees as we spin around on the earth from midnight to midnight. At our latitude this is around 15,000 miles a whole lot further than a polar reasearcher spinning slowly on his spot at the ice at the pole but not quite as far as someone at the equator.
We estimate that even before we start to walk we will already be racing eastwards out of the shadow of the night at 637mph on our spinning ball. Around midnight when we head off briskly through the “auld” east gate of Londonium up the Mile End Road, we should be pushing our peak speed to 640 heading straight for the heart of the sun, before we spin down away from her and turn up north towards the pole.
The lines of latitude are shorter as we climb the globe so we spin slightly slower every minute north, losing 80 mph if we gained a full degree this day.
As we near Cambridge we will veer slightly west, vainly trying to keep up with the sun and turn the dial back to an earlier time. At four minutes to midnight we will have completed our spin, but over the day the whole earth has moved a degree further along its orbit around the sun (or the sun around the earth as folks used to think) adding an extra four minutes of time for us to catch it.
Our route takes us east along the river out of the glare of the London, until we cross the River Lea and turn north to climb through the suburbs, before wending our way through a remnant of ancient forest as dawn breaks to day, then across the M25 bracelet into open green fields bathed in the midsummer sun until darkness falls on us in Cambridge .
Leg by leg
We have broken the route into five legs of about 12 miles. Each should take us about four hours and, with breaks, get us to Cambridge in twenty four hours. Select one to jump ahead or scroll the page to amble down.
