Sauntering: the art of walking without hurry

Camilla Lyse, authorised psychologist · Last reviewed 9 November 2026

To saunter is to walk slowly and without a fixed goal, paying attention to what is around you. It is not a hike with a summit to reach or a workout with steps to count. The point of a saunter is the walk itself: the light through the trees, the thought that turns up halfway, the side path you didn't plan to take.

Thoreau and the holy land

In his essay Walking (1862), Henry David Thoreau wrote that he had met only one or two people in his life "who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering". He traced the word to wanderers in the Middle Ages who asked for charity on the pretext of going à la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, until people called them "Sainte-Terrers", or saunterers. He also offered a second origin, sans terre: without land or a home, and therefore at home everywhere.

Language historians doubt both explanations, but the image has lasted. For Thoreau, every walk was a small pilgrimage: even the shortest one should be taken "in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return".

Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways

In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), the British writer Robert Macfarlane follows ancient tracks, holloways and sea paths in Britain and further afield. The book is about the paths themselves, made and kept by everyone who walked them before, and about how walking and thinking are bound together. Landscapes shape the people who move through them, Macfarlane suggests, and walking is a way of reading a place and of finding out what you think.

Why it matters to me

Sauntering is where I think most clearly, and it is part of why I offer walk-and-talk sessions in the Marselisborg forests. You can read about how those sessions work in ecotherapy and walk-and-talk.

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