Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

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Each writer expressed different reasons for their peripatetic lifestyle which often encompassed 10 - 14 miles per day. Some of the reasons for walking included:

I discovered through Andrew’s work that my walking is a practice known as pedestrianism, a practice known to yield immense satisfaction and revelation. The reader of Kerri Andrews’s Wanderers: A History of Women Walking laces her boots and strikes out with ten women who walked, wrote and wrote about walking… [She] shares the rapture of Virginia Woolf’s cry: “Oh the joy of walking!”‘ Laura Freeman, The CriticThe works of these women writer-walkers offer new insights into the role played by walking in human creativity, and demonstrate that while women walked at times for the same purposes as men, the experience of being on foot has frequently meant markedly different things for women… Virginia Woolf - Among the foremost modernist authors of the 20th Century, and for whose work - and life - walking was integral. Frauen, die wandern, sind nie allein" von Kerri Andres - ein Buch, das mich mitgenommen hat auf eine ganz besondere und intensive Reise. Man ist nicht nur unterwegs mit berühmten Denkerinnen sämtlicher Zeiten, sondern spürt gleichzeitig, was das Wandern für sie bedeutet hat und wie es sich auf ihr Leben, auf ihre Arbeit und ihre Seele ausgewirkt hat. Harriet Martineau - A sociologist, novelist, abolitionist and campaigner for women and the poor in the first half of the 19th Century, who wrote an early (and much-read) walking guide to the Lake District, which she came to know on foot perhaps as well as any writer of her time. My favourite chapter of all though was the one dedicated to Virginia Woolf, something about it just connected with me so deeply that I didn’t want it to end. I am not even all that familiar with Woolf’s own writing but Kerri’s exploration of the woman herself was simply awe-inspiring. I related so much to Woolf’s experience of being inspired, of writing and of self-understanding through the mode of walking because for me personally it is when I am wandering solo in the mountains that I feel most alive in my creativity and where the desire to write is at it’s strongest – yet, like Woolf, as much as the ideas and vision are there, I struggle to plant myself on a chair long enough to capture the thoughts because the process of walking is equally gratifying!

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. 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).In 1818, when Dorothy Wordsworth climbed up to Esk Hause with her friend Mary Barker, some picnic-bearing servants and a local guide, the pre-eminence of Scafell Pike was not yet clearly established. Arriving at the pass, Wordsworth and her party believed the “point of highest honour” to be neighbouring mountain Scafell; Dorothy was disappointed to find the route there too long to complete on an autumn day before dark. Settling for “the Pikes”, it was only after her return home that Wordsworth realised she had accidentally climbed the biggest peak in the land. Her excitement at the achievement came after the fact, but it was to be one of the feats of which she was most proud. 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 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). Only by placing her body into physical animation did she feel capable of animating her words, of giving life to sentences.’

Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderersguides us through the different ways of seeing ‐ of being‐ articulated by these ten pathfinding women. 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). I'm not sure there are grounds yet to claim absence of evidence, because so many of the accounts I've read have been in journals and letters – unpublished and therefore undervalued forms. I think if we were prepared to really trawl through the archives we would find thousands of women who walked – just writing about it to close friends, or noting briefly in their diaries their route – rather than publishing their accounts for a general audience. I found dozens more women I could have written about if the book had been set up slightly different. I'm not sure the ones I focus on are as exceptional as they might appear. 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. You're right, in some ways being a woman was far from enviable – especially if you lost control of your fertility through marriage. But that doesn't excuse ignoring women's accounts. I think we have lots of inherited ideas about what mountains are, what they are for, and those ideas (mountains are big, scary, dangerous, difficult etc) inflect who we think can, and should, go there. I'm writing at the moment about Dorothy Wordsworth's ascent of Scafell Pike in 1818. 'Mountaineering' as an idea had only been invented in 1802, so she was one of the first mountaineers at all, and yet what she saw there, and what she appreciated about climbing, has only recently been accepted as being of value. Her writing has a lot in common with Nan Shepherd's – and she had to wait thirty years after publication (and another 30 before that) for her words to find their audience.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).