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Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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It was a scorching day in June when I climbed Scafell Pike for the first time. The sky was a spectacular blue, and there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other people out on the mountain paths leading to and from the great pass at Esk Hause ,which links Borrowdale, Wasdale, Langdale, and Eskdale. Many were heading, like we were, for the summit of England’s highest mountain, and the kudos of having climbed nearly a kilometre above sea level. It was exhilarating to be able even to attempt the ascent. It was only after her return home that Wordsworth realised she had accidentally climbed the biggest peak in the land 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.

To me, Wanderers sounded like the perfect book to settle down with on a hot summer Sunday, after I had finished my own morning constitutional. It absolutely met my expectations in this regard. Andrews herself is a ‘keen hill walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland’, and her passion for the subject shone through at intervals. I really appreciate that throughout, the curator of these wonderful women quoted so much from their own work. All ten of those chosen are inspiring, and a lot of them challenged conventions in myriad ways. 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.

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When her race and my re-enactment of it had ended, Nellie Bly and I both shared a profound gratitude for the goodwill shown to us everywhere and a renewed faith in humanity. As she wrote in Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, “To so many people this wide world over am I indebted for kindnesses … They form a chain around the earth.” It is so high up that you feel as if in any moment you might topple into Loch Ness below. They say the loch is bottomless and treacherous, yet, on calm days, it is, as Coleridge writes ‘a painted ocean’. Isabella’s footsteps led me over the steep Digar La Pass, she astride a yak and me on foot. I stared across the Shyok River towards the village of Satti at the water’s edge in (what is now Chinese-occupied) Tibet, where Isabella was pitched into a perilous escapade on a scow (wooden ferry) that was being poled and paddled, while rapids propelled them into a hissing and raging gorge.

Kerri Andrews is a writer, keen hill walker and also the general editor of Nan Shepherd’s letters. Here she provides an exclusive edited extract from Wanderers. There’s also 20% discount for Walkhighlands readers. 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?Ellen Weeton, a governess in Ambleside, also wrote compelling accounts of her mountain climbing in her journal. Journaling was extremely popular then; unlike modern diaries, journals were written to be read by friends and family. Weeton's writing is so good it was eventually collected and published in 1969 - over a century after she died. 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 discovered through Andrew’s work that my walking is a practice known as pedestrianism, a practice known to yield immense satisfaction and revelation. 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. As a woman, one of the most precious things about these explorations for me is that I am allowed to do what male explorers can’t. I can spend time with the women of these traditional communities, listen to their stories and reflect them out to the wilder world. It may be broiling hot sitting in a tent beside the kitchen area, baking bread and brewing tea, but it’s where all the best tales are told.

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