From Ellen Weeton confounding local (male) Victorian assumptions with a solo ascent of Snowdon, and a solitary Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt ranging on foot across 19th Century Scotland, to the more contemporary account of Cheryl Strayed remaking herself through suffering on the Pacific Crest Trail, many of the women in the book walk alone. But for the solo female walker it's often assumed there'll be an undercurrent of anxiety, a fear of assault that a lone male might never consider - and some of these writers do voice such concerns. From both what you've read, and what you've experienced as a woman walker yourself, does a sense of vulnerability ever influence women's attitudes to walking alone? Might this still deter people? Dorothy cherished her walks with William, the way this joint practice restored their relationship and developed into a strong creative partnership.

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: 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. For me personally there were 3 particular standout chapters – those on Nan Shepherd, Cheryl Strayed and Virginia Wolf. I am a huge fan of Nan Shepherd’s work and The Living Mountain is a book which I read over and over again, for although she walked in the Cairngorms in Scotland and I walk in the Mournes in Northern Ireland, so much of what she unfolds in her short work resonates with me. She knew her mountains intimately, like friends, and it was that experience Kerri states that was ‘fundamental to her writing’. Kerri goes on to say that: ‘At the heart of Shepherd’s writing is a careful and subtle articulation of the complex interactions between physical movement, introspection and the landscape that create meaning in a human life.’ Kerri’s observations about the lives of the women in her book are equally as poised and intricate as Shepherd’s recordings of the terrain over which she wandered prolifically and with full awareness of the risks involved. Kerri explores the almost mystical aspect to Shepherd’s walking, the urges to ‘run away’ from her writing, the courageousness needed by Shepherd to accomplish the physical feats she writes of in The Living Mountain. Through Kerri’s words we are brought closer to understanding the woman behind the beautiful poetry and books that Shepherd brought to the world and that is such a precious gift.

A History of Women Walking

It's interesting to speculate how empowered women might have come to feel through walking, which is after all a way of literally taking charge of your own destiny. This feeling seems to come out in a lot of the writing quoted in Wanderers. In the course of your research, did you come across anything you might describe as proto-feminist? the omission of women from the literature of walking, can no longer be justified. For women walkers, their literary creativity is bound to walking just as tightly, and just as profoundly as men’s. But women move differently, see differently, and write differently about their experiences. To deny the existence of their accounts is to deny ourselves our own history”(263). I opened this book and instantly found that I was part of a conversation I didn't want to leave. A dazzling, inspirational history.”—Helen Mort, author of No Map Could Show Them Die Idee war wunderschön. Ich selber bin eine begeisterte Wanderin und Läuferin und konnte mich mit vielen Gefühlen, die die Autorin und „ihre“ Frauen empfanden und beschrieben, identifizieren. Dennoch konnte ich mich mit der Ausführung nicht anfreunden. Kerri Andrews hat eine umfangreiche Recherche durchgeführt und Frauen gefunden, die das Hobby Wandern aktiv betrieben und darüber in Briefen und Büchern berichteten. Ich will gar nicht wissen, wie viel Stunden alleine auf die Recherche gefallen sind. Im zweiten Schritt hat Kerri versucht den Geschichten dieser Frauen einen Rahmen zu geben. Einerseits hat sie den persönlichen Werdegang durchleuchtet und andererseits hat sie die verfassten Texte detailliert analysiert. Am Ende jedes Kapitels kam dann noch eine kleine persönliche Zusammenfassung und eigene Erfahrung mit Wanderungen, die Kerri selber gemacht hat und die sie an ihre Heldinnen erinnerten.

As humans, walking defines us. We are the two-legged apes. We walk, and we talk. We are thinking minds – thinking in language, more often than not. The rhythms of our walking and of our thinking are one”(9). Dazu muss allerdings auch erwähnt werden, dass ich aufgrund von der befristeten Leihfrist dazu gezwungen war schneller zu lesen, als mir lieber gewesen wäre. Ich kann mir sehr gut vorstellen, dass ich mit mehr Zeit einfach nur längere Pausen zwischen den Kapiteln eingelegt hätte um dieses Buch langsamer genießen und verdauen zu können.Kerri Andrews: A combination of bloody-mindedness and disbelief. I was reading Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways in 2014, and thinking of writing a book about how differently we used to move through the landscape, but nagging away was the appearance in the books I was reading that walking was done by men. I made a note in my journal querying this, and noting to myself to look into women's accounts '(if they exist)' I think I wrote. They most certainly do exist. But every book about walking I read – all by men – dismissed even the possibility that women might have walked, might have enjoyed it, might have found it creative and powerful. Kerri Andrews discusses her book, Wanderers, about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.

We'd like to think we live in enlightened times, but to what extent are there still similar barriers today? Nan’s mountain world taught me the importance of connecting with my surroundings, to take time away from technology and to sometimes just be, because according to Nan, “to know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain”. 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).After devouring Wanderers, I am much more enlightened as to what walking means to me and I am ecstatic to know that I follow in the footsteps of many legendary walker-writers. The governess Ellen Weeton, "found herself frustrated in her ambitions [to walk all over Wales] by anxieties about the social propriety of being a solitary woman on the road". How much of an influence were social attitudes, and notions of feminine propriety, in dissuading Victorian women from walking?

Though it must have been a minority pursuit, not least by dint of class, it's interesting to speculate how many women might have found time and motivation to walk for pleasure, despite the difficulties, but simply not written about it. Absence of evidence not being the same as evidence for absence, do you think the 18th and 19th Century writers you have looked at here are exceptional in that sense, or are they just the ones we know about for obvious reasons? Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly circled the world faster than anyone ever had in 1890. She travelled alone, with just a Gladstone bag, and shattered the fictional 80-day record of Phileas Fogg , returning in 72 days after travelling 21,740 miles. The fearless globetrotter had achieved “the most remarkable of all feats of circumnavigation ever performed by a human being,” said the New York World, sponsor of her trip.

Kathleen Jamie states in the Foreword of the book, “to walk is to notice,”(9) and Dorothy’s noticing and recording what she observed and experienced was material for brother William’s poetry as well as his A Guide Through the District of Lakes in the North of England, and later Harriet Martineau’s edition of such a guide too. (Martineau is also included in Wanderers.)