Chapter 6 centres on a cluster of related activities loosely designated as ‘tramping’: primarily labour migrancy and rural vagrancy but also the leisure activity known today as hiking. The advent of covert investigation radically extended the possibilities for exploring the hardships and freedoms associated with these overlapping varieties of mobility. In illuminating the psychology, social mores, and solidarities of lives spent on the move, undercover journalists changed the way Britons viewed rural space and its inhabitants. Foremost among the many writers impacted by this development was Thomas Hardy, whose Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891–92) is set in a landscape being doubly reshaped by labour migrancy and pedestrian tourism. In Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare’s aimless but utopian flight across open country, Hardy imagines a new kind of cross-class ‘tramping’ whose origins can be traced back to the impersonations and blurred identities of investigative journalism’s most openly participatory genre.