There's a version of a walking holiday where you carry everything, argue with a paper map and pray the next B&B has room. Then there's the self-guided setup offered by UK operator Contours: they book the accommodation, move your luggage and hand you a route, leaving you with nothing but the walking. With three decades in the business, the company has packaged Britain's best trails into a handful of trip styles — and the range is wider than most people expect.

The headline routes are all covered. You can walk chunks of the South West Coast Path with cream teas as your reward, follow the South Downs Way past Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, or take on Wainwright's Coast to Coast, which crosses three national parks before finishing at Robin Hood's Bay. Wales pitches in with the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, where puffins, seals and dolphins are part of the scenery, while Scotland offers the loch-side Great Glen Way and the rugged West Highland Way.

If ten miles a day sounds more like a holiday than an ordeal, shorter-mileage itineraries do the job nicely. A gentle Hadrian's Wall Path trip pairs Northumberland views from Walltown Crags with Roman forts at Chesters, Housesteads and Vindolanda. The Limestone Way introduces the Peak District via Cave Dale and Castleton's 11th-century Peveril Castle, and the 164km Cotswold Way strings honey-coloured villages between Chipping Camden and Bath.

Not keen on one-way routes? Circular options include the Land's End Round in Cornwall — with a stop at the clifftop Minack Theatre above Porthcurno Bay — plus the Lakeland Round, linking Windermere, Ullswater and Derwentwater with villages like Buttermere and Grasmere, and a Snowdon Round through Wales's slate-quarrying country and glacial valleys. For anyone who hates repacking, twin-centre trips split the stay between two bases: Settle and Malham in the Yorkshire Dales, within sight of Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough, or the Cotswold market towns of Cirencester and Tetbury, with Westonbirt Arboretum and the Highgrove gardens nearby.

Pressed for annual leave? Two-night mini breaks based in one spot — Castleton in the Peak District, or the Cotswolds between Moreton-in-Marsh and Bourton-on-the-Water — offer variable daily mileage, so the same trip works for a hard-charging hiker or someone who mainly wants riverside strolls and a pub at the end.

The appeal for travellers is simple: the trails themselves are free, well-marked and among the finest in Europe, and going self-guided removes the parts of a walking trip that usually put people off. It suits solo walkers, couples and first-timers alike — you choose the distance, the region and the pace, and someone else handles the beds and the bags.

Credit: Wanderlust