His goal was to walk from London to Edinburgh, but just getting to Redhill proved challenging

In an except from his book ‘I Went on a Walk’ Gabriel Stewart recounts the first day of his 1,000-mile journey

It was quite a gap year for the budding author and explorer (Pictures by Gabriel Stewart)

Hit me, shoot me, someone injure me, so that I cannot do this any more, but won’t be seen as giving up.”

My thoughts of harming myself to escape the pain I was feeling provided me with some worry for what lay ahead; it was the first day.

How could I walk to Edinburgh if I had struggled to reach the grand suburbia of Redhill? Surely, I had created a delusional fantasy that could not be realised. A fantasy that was self-inflicted. The pain was to be of my own making because I was the tw*t who had committed to walking the length of the UK.