How many miles is one day's travel?

Factual Questions
1

My sister needs to know this. She’s a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and apparently the question has come up.

She’s smart enough to know to search the Straight Dope archives, but didn’t find the answer there. So she appealed to me, and now I to you out there.

This would be traveling on foot or on a beast of burden (say a donkey or a walking horse, not a horse galloping hell-for-leather). She’s looking for an answer in a range of miles, e.g, 20 to 30 miles.

Of course, there are variables involving terrain, age of people traveling, etc., but on average, some range of miles.

Thanks, folks.

2

Well, if you assume that an average person walks three miles per hour you can use that as a starting point. A trekker might want to stop for a good lunch and arrive at a destination in good time to make camp. A fire could be assumed to be needed for lunch. Figure a couple of hours to make the fire, cook the meal and eat. When is sundown? 18:00? The party might want to have an hour’s daylight to make camp. So if they get up at 08:00 and walk until noon, then break two hours for lunch and walk from 14:00 until 17:00, they’ve walked seen hours in a day at 3 miles per. Figure in breaks for physiological necessities and you could probably call it about 20 miles per day.

There may be other factor such as terrain, weather, children, or other things that will delay the progress of the march, so I’d guess that a “day’s journey” would be bewteen 15 and 20 miles depending on conditions.

3

In the Roman Legions, an ordinary day’s march (iter or iter iustum) was anything from about 12 to 20 modern statute miles, and a forced march (iter magnum) was about 25 or 30 modern statute miles.

4

Depending when and where (and who):

Speeds of armies in Ancient Greece (read carefully, some info appears contradictory at first glance)

Description of Roman Legions on the March (includes one hypothetical marching day)

Letter of a Union soldier at the end of the Civil War describing an actual march

Description of Wagon train journeys across American Great Plains (not through the mountains)

5

For what it’s worth, in the Boy Scouts we once did a hike which was a bit under 20 miles in a day. The terrain was quite flat, which is also a consideration. As is how much you were carrying (I think we had 1 backpack with lunch… among the whole group).

6

FWIW, in 1396 Queen Margrethe I of Denmark ordered inns to be established along the main roads at intervals of 4 old Danish miles, i.e. 30 km or 16 American miles.

Christian II changed this to every second Danish mile in 1522 - apparently some people couldn’t cover the full distance per day.

(Inns established under those rules were known as “Royally Privileged” - 113 still exist. They used to have serious taxation benefits, the right to brew beer, distill spirits etc. - OTOH, they had to serve all travellers.)

S. Norman

7

Hmm. These answers are pretty close to the 15 - 20 miles ballpark. And they make darn good sense, especially Johnny’s. Tomndeb, thanks for the links. They seem to indicate the same. I’ll let her know.

I knew you’d come through for me! Gracias, muchachos.

8

The migrants on the Overland Trail from Missouri to Oregon and California figured 15 miles a day to be a good day’s travel. Of course, they had the restraints of livestock and draft animals to deal with since the animals had to be watered and fed at regular intervals and given time to graze and sleep in order to stay in working condition. On the push across (I think) the desert west of the Great Salt Lake, 60 miles without stopping for anything was the best way to get across. It took 48 hours of non-stop travel to do it, but that involved resting the draft animals for two or three days afterwards for them to be in shape for the rest of the trip.

The three miles an hour standard is the marching pace for a an infantry unit on roads. Stonewall Jackson, who was famous for march discipline and covering ground in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, insisted on the military standard of march for 50 minutes, rest for 10 minutes. This is a pretty rigorous standard when you are carrying every thing you need to live, plus a five-foot long musket and ammunition.

The Fifth Army Corps, Union Army of the Potomac, marched 27 miles in about 15 hours in order to get to the Battle of Gettysburg. This was famous marching at the time.

Sherman’s Army covered about 15 miles a day in the March to the Sea, but they were busy ripping the heart out of Georgia as well as covering ground.

Cavalry on roads was expected to cover 30 miles in a day marching from dawn to late afternoon with a break at noon to feed and water the animals, thus the old song:

Oh, the drums they bang
And the cymbals clang,
And this is the way we go,
Its thirty miles a day
On beans and hay
In the Regular Army, Oh.

Three miles an hour is a reasonable pace for walking on roads, but remember the time needed to provide for the creature necessities. Remember that the standard for the Roman Army marching pace assumed paved roads and permanent camps and minimal congestion. That’s why the Romans built the roads in the first place. The more people you try to put on a road at one time the more congestion is going to slow them up. This is why the Fifth Corps march was so remarkable. The Corps consisted of some 10,000 soldiers with ammunition wagons, ambulances, baggage wagons and artillery and made a column some four or five miles long. Breaking 10,000 men out of camp, forming them into marching columns, walking 27 miles and then going back into camp in a long day is a remarkable achievement.

9

General Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Division knocked the Germans on their collective can in Sicily in 1943 by perfecting a grueling style of march known as the “Truscott Trot”:

“…General Truscott introduced something new in training methods. Soon dubbed the “Truscott Trot,” the innovation proved to be a marching speed of five miles an hour for one hour, four miles an hour for the next two hours, and three and one-half miles an hour for the remainder of a 30-mile march.”

All that included a minimum fifty pounds of gear. It was brutal, required lots of training to become acclimatized, and I’ve seen the 3rd Division’s feat of 100 miles in three days compared with the superlative marches in history. Actually, it compares favorably to some of the greatest motorized military advances in history. It probably represents the extreme upper limit of collective human ability.

10

Well, one of the few things I remember from my Iowa History & Government class I took back in 7th grade (1975 or so) was that Iowa’s 99 counties were laid out in such a way that anyone living in the county could go to the county seat and back in a single day by horse & wagon.

IIRC, this would make for a maximum one-way distance of 25-35 miles; it’d probably be a bit less if you have to walk or you’re driving non-equine livestock.

11

While the information on armies and their marching is interesting, I believe my sister is looking for information more along the lines of “if some medieval folk were to say a town or an inn was a day’s travel from some other point, roughly how far would that be in miles?” She didn’t specify, but I assume this, based on her involvement with SCA.

I also assume this means roads or cartpaths, if not actual paved highways, and relatively flat (or at least not mountainous) terrain. This would also be undertaken with no more baggage than a sack over the back or something a donkey could cart in saddlebags. Certainly not the rigors of 50 or 60 pounds per person, as with the military.

In other words, if Tom the Tinker told you, “Canterbury is but a day’s travel from 'ere, milord,” then you’d expect to walk about 15 or 20 miles.

Why she needs this information is a mystery to me.

Further bulletins as warranted.

12

Actually, I went looking for long trek information based on the idea that so much fantasy and related stuff is tied in to The Journey.

If you were looking for a single day’s travel without the need to do it again the following day, I’d push the number much higher than 15. When I was in school in Europe there was a walk-a-thon that I got sucked into. The course was supposed to be 25km starting in the next city over. I was unfamiliar with the bus system in the other city, so when I got off the train (1 1/4 miles from my room to the station) I walked 3 1/2 miles to the start point, did the 15 1/2 mile walk over rolling hills, walked 1 mile back to my room, then walked out another 1 1/2 miles each way to catch supper. Since I was generally using shank’s mare for my transportation, anyway, I was not at all tired after the jaunt and had no trouble getting up and doing my normal routine the following day. I would think that a person who was used to walking could do a single 25 mile day without much trouble. (Keeping up that pace for multiple days would wear pretty fast.)

13

I read in High School a book called A Walk Across America about this guy who, guess what, walks across America. He has a back back and a dog.

I don’t remember his mileage but you might consult that book. Of course YMMV.

14

Another obscure (anachronistic) measure of distance is a “Drovers Day”.

Droving means moving livestock along public roads, either to move between places or to take advantage of the grass along the road during times of drought. During dry seasons mobs “in the long paddock” often covered thousands of miles and took months, if not years.

In Australia there is a legislated distance that livestock (i.e. cattle & sheep) need to travel each day of 16km (10 miles) per day for cattle and 10km (6 miles per day for sheep.

The rationale behind the limit is to prevent stock being left in a favourable location semi-permentantly leading to overgrazing and also prevented stock being pushed too hard and causing stress and losses.

15

As it turns out, my sister does not require this info for SCA. She is working on mapping out the world of Elfquest (which I confess I know nearly nothing about). I recall her talking about this on a recent visit. She hasn’t given me the skinny on everything, but it may be that some distances are given as “a day’s travel.” So, to make the map to scale, she’s got to convert this into miles.

As an artist, my sister is very detail-oriented, and really wants to get everything right. She even had her husband, who is a geophysicist, go over the topography at one point to make sure it was geologically correct.

Tomndeb, I agree that in a society of walkers, perhaps 25 miles would be more like it, so perhaps she could stretch the range to 15 - 25 miles. But she wanted to make sure that it wasn’t some ridiculous measure like 8 miles or 45 miles, both of which, for our purposes, wouldn’t fit into the “day’s travel” concept.

16

If she drops “march miles per day” or “travel miles per day” into Google, she’ll/you’ll get dozens of hits on gaming scenarios. I omitted them 'cause I figured she was trying to make real life esimates. (The gamers often have done solid research, but you don’t know what their fudge factors are–I would expect hobbits to move at a different rate than elves and orcs.) If she’s looking to draw a map based on Elfquest, there might be a site that gives Elfquest’s specific correlation.

17

She’s very familiar with any Elfquest sites extant, of that I’m sure. Still, I can ask. But that’s the whole reason she’s doing the map in the first place. A number of Elfquestrians got together online and decided to map this stuff out and put it all together. Since she’s an artist, and has done cartography, she’s doing the actual drawing, but many others are involved.

It’s sort of like mapping Narnia, if I get the gist of it. This world doesn’t really exist, but it’s described enough that people who follow it could conceivably map its terrain.

At any rate, I think Johnny L.A. came nearest the mark. Traveling is different than marching or the organized walks we’ve described here. I’m thinking 15 to 25 miles is not too short or too arduous for making a day of it.

My sister was very impressed with the alacrity of the responses, BTW. To truncate a George M. Cohan phrase, “My sister thanks you, and I thank you.”