I walked across the vast undulating plateau, past reindeer herds, to the summits of the highest peaks and to sparkling blue lochs, where, without another soul in sight, I swam naked, just like Nan. I had no place to be and no specific time to be there. I would sleep with the sunset and wake with the sunrise. With no modern equipment I became in tune with my environment. The old clothes enabled me to feel the elements and with no phone for distraction, I was present to observe the smallest details. I sat for hours, doing nothing, just learning to be. The stronger walkers in this book seem to have regularly outpaced the men they encounter, and yet often to have met disapproval or patronisation for being women in a man's pursuit. Do you think they would have enjoyed leaving the men in their dust, and would any have felt that this was in some small way one in the eye for the patriarchy (or 19th Century words to that effect)?

Being less bloody-minded, women were also pretty adept at managing social attitudes and responsibilities – and finding ways to do what they wanted, or needed to do. Plus, poorer women would have had to walk anyway, with their children and to work. So we also need to remember that our discussion here is inflected by class. So, it’s not surprising that a good friend recently gifted me Kerri Andrews book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking.Historically, conventional female roles such as motherhood and marriage must have served as very effective barriers to women getting out walking, or even thinking of that as an option. How big were those obstacles in the 19th Century, and are you surprised that anyone managed to overcome them? So far from considering this a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise – but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings. The book introduces a number of women that it's probably fair to assume most readers will be hearing about for the first time. How did you encounter them all? Cheryl Strayed - Author of the bestselling memoir Wild, the account of a life-defining, at times gruelling, solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (since made into a film). Denn erst die Sprache des Gehens vermittelte ihr ein Verständnis davon, wie ihr Geist funktionierte und dass die physische Welt, durch die sie schritt, eine wichtige Struktur bildete, in die sie ihr eigenes Innenleben auf solche Weise einpassen konnte, das beide sich wechselseitig bereicherten. ...<<

I’m what people call ‘a walker.’ There is rarely a day that passes that I do not intentionally go for a walk. Any chance I can, I walk wherever I’m going instead of driving. This is a well-known fact to those who know me. Nan Shepherd - Free spirited doyenne of the Cairngorms, and author (among other works) of The Living Mountain, a small but beautiful book that has had a profound influence on the contemporary style of nature writing. I like that a theme of Wanderers is not just walking for exercise, or to escape, but as recovery. Harriet Martineau, for example, was bedbound for 5 years ‘by a mysterious condition that left her fearing for her life. Cured by mesmerism, she measured the return of her health by the increasing number of miles she was able to cover… A move to the Lake District followed, and with it an earnest desire to become, like Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William, entwined with the complex social, geographical and literary histories of the area.’ Weighed down by old equipment, I walked for five hours to the Cairngorm plateau from the closest village of Aviemore, setting up camp in a vast glacial gulley in the shadow of Cairn Gorm mountain, my home for the next 17 nights. From here, I would set out each day with a map, visiting places Nan described so beautifully in her book. Nan’s mountain world taught me the importance of connecting with my surroundings, to take time away from technology I think it's both. Social squeamishness is evident in tampon adverts or sanitary towels being filled with mysterious blue liquid (I'd be very worried if something that colour ever emanated from my body), but I think a discussion of the subject in outdoor literature is only surprising to us because we're used to non-menstruating bodies telling the stories.

Books

In July 1798, a 22-year old woman went up Snowdon with her mother, aunt, and a local Welsh-speaking guide. The women began walking at 11pm aiming for sunrise on the summit. To a modern reader, this approach seems surprisingly intrepid. But in fact, night ascents of Snowdon were not unusual. A manuscript from 1775 held in the National Library of Wales reveals an anonymous woman voicing her frustration that her group (a party that included three women) would not set out to climb Snowdon at midnight, as she desired, but at 8am the next morning. Each writer expressed different reasons for their peripatetic lifestyle which often encompassed 10 - 14 miles per day. Some of the reasons for walking included: A wild portrayal of the passion and spirit of female walkers and the deep sense of ‘knowing’ that they found along the path.”—Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path We'd like to think we live in enlightened times, but to what extent are there still similar barriers today?

These reasons spoke to my soul. When I was co-authoring a book, I often walked twice a day so that I could think through the prose, story arcs, symbolism, and details.

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Most people have a specific destination in mind on their weekend journeyings. A point to their travels, a stately home, a garden open to the public, an acquaintance whom they might “drop in on” in the passing. Not us. Never us. The countryside itself was the magnet that drew us.” UKHillwalking: The established canon of early walking-writing is overwhelmingly male, and yet you've cited examples in Wanderers of women who equally deserve a place alongside their better known male peers. For instance, you write of Lakeland expert Harriet Martineau: "Recognized in her own time as a walker-writer to rival the Lake poets who put the area on the literary map, it is important we recognize that the map we carry of walking's history is incomplete without her." For most people, I'd bet that history is very much incomplete. What inspired you to undertake this reclamation of the role of women in the literary history of walking? Walking and losing herself in the pulse of life provided not only material for Woolf’s stories, but the placing of one foot in front of the other established a forward trajectory, fueling the timely unfolding of her stories and revelatory musings of specific characters: Kerri Andrews is Reader in Women’s Literature and Textual Editing at Edge Hill University. Kerri is one of the leaders of Women In The Hills, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project aimed at exploring the factors enabling and inhibiting women’s access to upland landscapes. The project brings together people from all areas of walking, mountaineering, land access and management, to drive change in women’s access and experiences.

Virginia Woolf - Among the foremost modernist authors of the 20th Century, and for whose work - and life - walking was integral. In the journals of these walks, Dorothy documented not only the itineraries of her party and her own walking, but the encounters with people and landscapes which proved emotionally and creatively significant…but it was the walking itself that enabled specific and important kinds of understanding about herself and the ways in which connections with other lives might be sustained”(68). Like Harriet Martineau in the Lake District eighty years before, Kesson found in the hills a new freedom, a release from physical confinement. And like Martineau, Kesson celebrated and internalised this freedom by walking in a place in which life could now expand, so that, in Kesson’s case, she became attuned to the unique ‘rhythm’ of each tree’s susurration.The first eight years of my childhood were spent in a small room in a city tenement. My mother, country born and bred, was alienated from her family, so that springs and summers were spent wandering through the highways and byways of her Morayshire roots. We haunted that landscape. Rarely able to afford public transport my feet became as tough as new leather. As part of a decade-long project to recreate the journeys of the first female explorers, with the aim of bringing their names out of obscurity, I chose to follow her path on foot, across the same mountain passes into northern Nubra, admiring the brightly coloured prayer flags that blew across the mountainous landscapes as she described in Amongst the Tibetans. Isabella’s footsteps led me over the steep Digar La Pass, she astride a yak and me on foot For most of her married life, Virginia Woolf divided her time between Sussex and London. Her writing makes clear that the very different environments provide by the two locations were equally necessary: too much London risked the kind of ‘over-stimulation’ that could threaten her mental equilibrium, while too much Sussex could lead to feelings of isolation”(171). Most women, myself included, do not walk alone after dark if we can avoid it. No matter how unfair this is and how angry it makes many of us, we calculate it’s not worth the risk. But Woolf didn’t always heed these warnings, as she recorded that she “rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases & incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed”(162).