Before a friend of my wife lost her husband, they had helped a friend through a very difficult grieving and held that walking was a significant process that aided the grieving process. This continued with her own loss and I think I have helped her to understand terrain, see more and interact with the landscape. Some of this I have done by broadening my wife's experience and she has passed this to her friend.
Now she despairs with some of the walking groups she goes out with as all they seem to do is have an ambulatory chatter session, but everyone to there own, some people might curse the puddles, because they slow them down, others will be fascinated by there shapes and others may argue with me that puddles are not landscape.
If you can walk 20 miles you may be able to walk into the perception most people have of landscape, but when you get there there is no fixed point and the landscape is different, what have you experience on the way. Unless you understand the terrain, you will not know what I am talking about. But if stand 2,3 say 5 miles from Snowdon and walk to the top you will know what you have done, some will be impressed but will you have had more or less experience.
People need the countryside, it helps sanity, it can de-stress this is done in a manner ways, but your dissertation specifies walking and it should be the cheapest form of exercise an unfit population can take, do you hop on a bus ride to the city limits and walk away, when you look back you have landscape, does one feel relief when sitting on Hampstead Heath looking over that skyline or is the softer images of say Waterlow Park better value, how many understand when they walk in Highgate Wood that they are in one of the oldest Hornbeam Forests, yet scour the Welsh Marches and you will be lucky to find a single mature Hornbeam.
As spring comes on us the red purple glow that comes of the canopy of mass Alder is part on a landscape, missed by those who look for the stuff they don't like.
And then there are secret places, still landscapes, if you can see them. You may find them yourself but you are young and have the time to find them, perhaps you might ask someone and be surprised. Once when I recognized one of these places, because I knew it was special. I talked to local smallholder nearby and learnt his father and mother would go there often through their lives, because it was where his father proposed to his mother, he added with a wry smile, "I could have been conceived there".
If you get the perspective to create the image, the social or historical knowledge and have the imagination to fill in the picture then I think you might be on the way to finding some understanding of part of the Geography of walking.