Walking is the steady hum behind so much of our literature that we tend to take it for granted. Sometimes it literally provides the rhythm. Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, argues that Coleridge stopped writing blank verse when he stopped taking long walks. There are rural striders (by one estimate Wordsworth tramped over more than 290,000km over his lifetime) and urban strollers (Baudelaire, the original flaneur; Walter Benjamin, Edmund White). Struggling on two feet over great, enemy-assailed distances provides dramatic tension and physical atonement in countless narratives, from the Pilgrim's Progress to The Lord of the Rings.
Walking is about health, physical and mental ("If I couldn't walk fast and far," said Dickens, of his pacing through London streets, "I should explode and perish.") But it has also been elevated into something holier - a conviction that, as Nietzsche put it, "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking".
We tend to think of Dylan Thomas as a prodigious drinker, a bohemian and bon vivant. But he was also, as he wrote in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), "a lonely night-walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk around the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebeneezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility ..."
That lurking vision led directly to the shifting points of view in his radio play Under Milk Wood, set in a small Welsh township over the course of 24 hours - two nights and one day. The town was partly New Quay, in Cardiganshire, where he spent a year at the end of the war, but mostly it was Laugharne, in south Wales, which he first visited in May 1934, and moved his family to in 1949. Its contours are Laugharne's: "To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea." Its characters, his wife Caitlin said later, are Laugharne's: "Dylan loved all that small-town pomp and the nonsense gossip he picked up every morning in Ivy William's kitchen at Brown's Hotel." It was so much Laugharne, in fact, that when the play was first broadcast by the BBC in 1954, it was considered vital to use the real children of Laugharne in the chorus.
What better way to remember Dylan, then, than by strolling around the town in which he worked, lived and was buried? I begin next to Laugharne Castle, its ruins threaded through with cawing rooks, before turning immediately left, along the rocky shore. Stairs wind up to the Boathouse, the Thomases' home: "My seashaken house / On a breakneck of rocks/ Tangled with chirrup and fruit / Froth, flute, fin and quill / At a wood's dancing hoof, / By scummed starfish sands / With their fishwife cross / Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails ..." The living room, where his voice intones his own poetry, is evocative enough, but the house itself, snuggled into the cliff face, is rather too spruced up; much better is his study, a tiny box perched on stilts above the receding sea. A small fireplace, crumpled papers on and around the desk, a jacket thrown over a chair, and gusts of wind from underneath lifting the carpet like a lung. The route climbs past these buildings into a tunnel of green. Cow parsley and ivy and bluebells bank the path high above the estuary; the occasional mossy trunk arches over you; the crowns of old sycamores fall below your feet. Under Milk Wood is set on a sunny day; when we go the sky is overcast, and the wind rushes through the high trees as through a green sea. But it is spring now, too, so fecund that you can almost see the fern-fronds uncurling.
The tunnel gives way to hillocks of yellow gorse, a chestnut tree fenced proud and lonely at the centre of a field, past an old stone house to another green way, full of primroses and ferns, and one huge, white mushroom. A tarmacked road, past more cottages, then suddenly, to the right, an old graveyard, gloomy with 500-year-old yews. It's far more atmospheric than the new graveyard nearby, where Thomas is actually buried, lying with Caitlin under a white cross that has become a pathetic sort of shrine. Someone has left a plastic Welsh dragon on it, dropped a white plastic horse into the blue heather at its base, and scattered the crossbar with small change.
• Aida Edemariam walked route 2718 (Dylan Thomas's village), an "easy" 6km.
