Discovering the Past: Self-Guided Walking Tours

There are ghost walking tours, heritage home walking tours, cultural tours, historic district tours, old city tours… the list goes on. I’m always keeping my eyes open for self-guided walking tours when we travel. Why? There is a sense of place that comes when we connect feet to ground and minds to the past.

Organized tours are always an option in larger cities, but if you’re like us and enjoy travelling at your own pace without a crowd, then guided walks may not be the best choice. We always enjoy discovering the past through self-guided walking tours – and there’s no better time than now to plan for future travel. Come along and we’ll show you how we do it.

Disclosure: This post contains Affiliate links.

Why Walking?

There is no doubt we enjoy walking – whether it’s a stroll through an historic district, a walk along an established trail or an off-route hike up to a mountain peak. Walking has a conscious and unconscious way of allowing us to engage with, understand and appreciate our environment. It has a power to connect us with an area and create a sense of place.

“Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.” – Rebecca Solnit

Resources for Self-Guided Walking Tours

Whoa! You might be thinking you don’t have the time or the inclination to create your own self-guided walking tour. Ease up – you don’t necessarily have to. Chances are good that someone has done the work for you. You just need to learn where to find these resources. 

Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and Moon Handbooks are our “go to” guidebooks. They match our style of budget travel and – even better – they often have short walking tours already set out for areas we want to explore. We often use the city maps with numbered historic sites and/or buildings and follow along as we walk the streets.

Goldmines of Information

Always stop in at Tourist Offices and Visitor Centres and scan their brochure racks. I hit paydirt in Carcross, Yukon doing just this. The “Historic Sites Carcross Walking Tour” pamphlet is pure gold. The Parks Canada Visitor Centre in Prince Albert National Park has an excellent map of the townsite with a list of Waskesiu’s heritage sites. Wandering through southern Utah, we stopped in at the Kane County Office of Tourism and picked up a nugget that led to hours of exploring Kanab’s historic homes.

Also, if you don’t see what you’re looking for, go up the staff behind the desk and ask them: “Do you have any guides for walking tours of this area?”

There is always hidden treasure.

Check out Museums and Libraries

Travelling on the road, we’re always looking for internet access to check email, etc. Small town libraries are perfect for getting connected and finding self-guided walking tour options through books, pamphlets and even on bulletin boards. We read a small poster on a board in Washington, Utah about a historic walking tour open house – where visitors were welcome to come in and explore over a half dozen historic properties for free on a specific day.

Museums. Needless to say, we have visited a museum or two… hundred in our travels. We discovered an historic walking tour map in a free newspaper in a tiny museum in the ghost town of Pioche, Nevada. Museum gift shops are ideal to find books and printed materials that will lead you on your next self-guided walking tour. 

Scan the Net

Type in the name of the place you want to explore and add “self-guided walking tour.” I’m doing this right now for Scotland – yup, our first trip when life returns to normal. On my first search, I found Nomad Epicureans and a post entitled: “Free Self-Guided Edinburgh Walking Tour: Highlights & Overlooked Gems (With Map!). 

In the first paragraph, they write: “With our free map, you can follow the route quite easily without having to hire an expensive guide for the day. The tour will take you past the city’s major attractions, landmark public buildings, places of worship, cultural venues, restaurants, and cafes. You’ll also learn a few lesser-known facts about Edinburgh along the way.”

This is exactly what I am looking for and I am adding to our trip file. When it comes time to travel, I have the option of printing this off before we go or pulling it up on my smartphone while we are there. 

Tip for Best Online Resources

Be sure to check the dates on blogposts to make sure it is relatively recent (this one was updated less than six months ago). You never know what can happen to your proposed tour route. Natural disasters, fires and road closures can drastically alter plans. Make sure the maps are current.

Finding Mobile Tour Apps

I can’t say we’ve had a lot of experience using mobile tour apps, but I am looking into it for our next big trip. More and more viable options are coming online. I found 19 different, self-guided, walking tours to Edinburgh, Scotland in GPSmyCity. Aside: Love this app’s tagline, “Lose Yourself Without Getting Lost.”

For anyone going to Europe, Rick Steves’ Audio Europe App offers a variety of tours for cities, historical sites, museums and more. I haven’t found the perfect walking tour here yet but have downloaded a guide interview on Edinburgh and Scotland. Native-born tour guide Ken Hanley joins Rick to help plot the best itineraries through Scotland’s cities and outer islands. It will be useful in preplanning.

Keep Going!

GeoTourist has hundreds of user-designed tour itineraries in cities around the world. Tours are free. A quick search and I found an Open University Walk Around Edinburgh. BBC’s Neil Oliver leads this stroll through 16^thcentury Edinburgh. This was a time when Mary Queen of Scots “left a trail of riots, affairs and murders in her wake.” Perfect – lead on!

Pocket Guide Audio Travel Guide has three tours of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and Edinburgh’s New Town. They are available as a set of three – or they can be purchased individually. After purchasing, you get an audio guide and map, which is available for offline after downloading. The app tracks your location via GPS and starts playing an audio commentary when you arrive at a point of interest. Sounds foolproof. Once I have everything together, I’ll take a closer look and see if we need them or not. 

Walking Appy

These are just a small sample of the dozens of apps out there for self-guided walking tours. No matter which app you choose to use, you’ll need to start by downloading it from your phone’s app store. If it’s new to you, spend some time familiarizing yourself with the app’s features before you start walking! Be sure you pick an app that can work offline to save using data.

Tips for Creating A Super-Personalized Self-Guided Tour

You can follow a self-guided walk created by someone else – or you can create your own. The simplest way is to gather together a variety of tours other people have already created. No single one will cover everything you’d personally like to see. All of them will have a few sites you’d rather pass by. Go through each tour and gather the sites that interest you the most. Use these to map out your own tour. We do this all the time and it works like a charm. 

In addition to the great tour I mentioned above from Nomad Epicureans, I also found self-guided tours in Edinburgh from a variety of other bloggers. I’ll go over each and start making a list of all the sites that interest us. I’ll then mark them on a paper map of the city or region and draw out a route, numbering each one as I go. 

A more techy approach would be to use an app to do the same thing. GPSmyCity, for example, allows you to create your own self-guided walk to visit the attractions which interest you the most. CityMaps2Go allows you to plot all of the historic sites – or pubs or food markets – you plan to see on each map you then download and use offline. You can add information about each site in the notes section.

Ready, Set, Get Walking 

Walking into the past is one of our favourite things to do when we travel. I love creating historic, self-guided walking tours. It really doesn’t matter if you find a tour in a print publication, online, through an app or create your own. Discovering the past through a self-guided walking tour helps you create unique memories and a stronger sense of place. 

So, where will we find you walking next?

Love historic walking tours? Check out these posts!

• A Journey Close to Home: Walking Glenbow Ranch
• Nelson, BC Historic Walking Tour
• Painted Desert Inn: A History Tour | Arizona
• Self-guided Walking Tour of St. John’s
• Exploring Historic Cemeteries
• Exploring the McLean Mill National Historic Site
• Historic Tea House Hikes in Banff National Park