As I was doing some photo research for a book project, I stumbled across some pictures that astonished me. These images were taken during the 19th century, in a region in the southwest of France called Landes. At the time it was an impoverished place, inhabited mostly by shepherds. There were few roads and the ground was flat and marshy. So the people of Landes developed a unique way of getting around: they travelled on stilts.
In 1891, a Frenchman from the region named Sylvain Dornon walked on his stilts from Paris to Moscow in a mere 58 days. You can read more about these people here, in a Scientific American article of 1891.
(Most of these images come from the NYPL digital gallery, which you can find here.)