“hiking homeless”

“hiking homeless” names a condition that is at once visible and easily misunderstood: two people travelling on foot, whose apparent freedom does not cancel the fact that they have lost their home. First spoken by Colin during a nighttime encounter, the phrase gives the walkers a brief, humane description that holds both parts of their situation together. Across the narrative, it also marks a contrast between the path’s felt openness and the practical exclusions that made walking their available way forward.

The phrase and the encounter

The expression enters the story in a city, when a man approaches the walkers on a bench and tries to understand why they are there. They identify themselves as homeless and say they are staying only for the night. Colin responds that they will not be alone: others are nearby, and he cautions them not to take someone else’s sleeping place. He introduces himself, offers a beer, and calls them “the hiking homeless.” The phrase is immediately social rather than official. It acknowledges their homelessness while distinguishing their journey from the familiar image of a person sleeping rough in a doorway.

The welcome is practical as well as verbal. Colin has a beer to share despite the walkers’ lack of money, and later, when Dean challenges them for drinking with strangers, Colin explains their presence and gestures them away from the confrontation. The encounter ends with the walkers leaving to catch the ferry. Colin tells them he might one day go for a hike himself. His response does not solve their housing insecurity, but it briefly changes the terms of the encounter: they are not treated only as intruders or objects of suspicion, but as people on a journey whose choice might be understood by someone else.

Walking as circumstance and purpose

The phrase joins two facts that the story refuses to separate. The walk has purpose and, in the immediate crisis, gives the couple somewhere to go; it also begins after their home and holiday-rental business have been taken from them. Renting proves difficult: their credit rating is poor, campsite fees are unaffordable, and the council’s available offer is a bed-and-breakfast room that they do not want. A tent becomes preferable to the limited accommodation options they are offered. In this context, walking is neither simply a recreational choice nor merely an imposed hardship. It is an active way of moving through a life constrained by the loss of a stable place to live.

The physical path gives that movement a daily texture. Above Minehead, a steep zigzag climb makes the guidebook’s description of a route that “drifts a little inland and uphill” seem like an understatement. Later, on a hot cliff path, burning skin, watering eyes, vertigo, and the sensation of wind beneath a rucksack make the walkers’ bodies part of how the coast is known. On the South West Coast Path, pain and hunger rise and fall into a rhythm; the sea’s continuing boom and the changing ground shape attention from one step to the next. The journey can feel exhilarating, but its meaning is inseparable from exertion and the need to keep moving.

That rhythm becomes a form of endurance. The narrator reflects that each step has its own moment of power or failure, and that climbing out of each combe can count as a victory. At the Jurassic Coast, returning from months of inland confinement to the open horizon brings relief; camping on Ballard Down, the walkers watch the lights of Swanage stretch across the bay. Such moments show why the journey can feel like home without making it a secure substitute for housing. The path offers continuity and a direction forward, but not the protections of a settled dwelling.

Public labels and hidden homelessness

The book sets the phrase against a narrow public stereotype of homelessness: a rough sleeper on the street, perhaps with a dog, assumed to be begging for money for drugs or alcohol. That image, the narrative argues, shapes reactions ranging from discomfort to aggression. Official figures also depend on definitions and methods of counting. Research by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that in 2013 at least 280,000 UK households had claimed to be homeless or at risk of becoming homeless; officials accepted 52,000 as statutorily homeless, while many others received help through a local-authority relief route. These were households seeking help, not a count of individual people.

The figures for rough sleeping reveal a further gap. A government snapshot estimated that 2,414 people slept rough across England during 2013. For London, the Homelessness and Information Network, funded by the Greater London Authority, recorded 6,508 people sleeping rough over the year, while the government snapshot for the period counted 543. The narrative draws attention to those absent from lists and snapshots, including people who sofa-surf, squat, or sleep in less visible places. Against this background, “hiking homeless” does not erase the category of homelessness; it exposes how quickly a label can narrow what observers think they are seeing.

The walkers have already encountered that pressure in conversation. When they explain that they are walking because they have lost their home, people recoil and conversations end. They begin instead to say that they sold their home to seek adventure. The difference between the account that provokes rejection and the one that earns admiration is the difference between having lost a home and having sold it. Repeating the more acceptable story dulls the grief, the narrator observes, even as uncertainty remains about whether the illness diagnosis is also being denied. Colin’s phrase offers a more direct description, but its warmth depends on one person’s response; it cannot undo the wider social reflex that makes homelessness difficult to disclose.

A name without a permanent shelter

Other forms of homelessness in the narrative make clear that the phrase describes no single way of living. In a woodland camp, John and Gav lead the walkers along dark tracks to tents, tarpaulins, and shelters made from fallen branches. John explains that he became homeless after a farm was sold and the tied cottages were separated from the land and bought as second homes. His later jobs did not provide housing, and rural rents exceeded what his wages could cover. The camp has grown into a changing village of people who come and go as need arises. Elsewhere, a disused meat-packing shed provides a roof, but its peeling wall covering, melted plastic, moss, exposed insulation, and flickering industrial light leave it unmistakably a former processing room. These places differ from street sleeping, but neither offers the certainty of a home of one’s own.

The walkers’ own account of home also changes. Near the southernmost point of the mainland, the narrator recognizes that they will not return to their former house and its slate floor, garden, cats, and view of the Plough. A strip of dirt beneath their feet has become home in a provisional sense. Acceptance grows: belonging need not depend on owning a patch of land, even though the couple must still decide how to face the winter. When they later return to the coast after time inland, the familiar horizon brings relief, but the practical plan remains to earn money, find a room, and consider retraining. The phrase therefore holds a tension rather than resolving it: the walkers can claim purpose, companionship, and movement, while remaining without a settled place. Its force lies in making both truths legible at once.