Dorothy cherished her walks with William, the way this joint practice restored their relationship and developed into a strong creative partnership. 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. This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. 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.

I rated Wanders a three because it didn't hold my attention throughout the book and felt more like an academic exercise at times. Considered “one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century,” English writer Virginia Woolf was a walker-writer extraordinaire. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book because Andrews does such a thorough job describing how the practice of walking contributed to Woolf’s creative process, as well as the fragile balance of her life. Here are a few snippets from this intriguing chapter. Freya’s stories of travelling secretly with the Druze in Syria, searching for the Queen of Sheba, and doing her last expedition at 75 fired my young imagination and now, years later, reassure me that we female explorers. have an important contribution to make. Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt - Who in the 1820s, during an unpleasant divorce from the essayist William Hazlitt, 'found strength in walking' long distances alone across central Scotland. 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.Anaïs Nin - The famously emancipated essayist, diarist and novelist, for whom city walking served as both creative inspiration and escape. So why is it so difficult for half of the human race simply to walk? Why can’t a woman ramble around, unaccompanied and unburdened, exploring the world she was born into, while turning her own thoughts in her mind? Such a harmless occupation! It doesn’t seem too much to ask, to be able to walk outdoors, even in daylight, without fear. Of course we know why not. But of course we walk anyway, despite fear and derision, and always have”(9). 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).

As a writer, sociologist and anti-slavery campaigner Martineau was an outstanding intellect of her age, a real polymath. And no slouch when it came to feats of walking endurance over the fells, written up in an engaging style. But until reading Wanderers, I hadn't even heard of her. To what extent can we put that down to the fact that she was a Harriet, not a Harry? Why do you think women walker-writers of the first calibre have been more easily forgotten, while male contemporaries such as William Wordsworth remain household names (at least in better read households)? 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. Periods. "By reading accounts of walking only written by men" you say "such matters must rarely, if ever, have assumed any importance in our understanding of what it means to walk." Yet menstruation is the experience of half the world, and any woman who walks will know what it is like to be on her period somewhere inconvenient. So why is Cheryl Strayed seemingly so unusual in giving full voice to this inevitable "embodied perspective of a woman" in her book Wild? Are we all simply too squeamish to bear it, or is this a sign that the female experience of the outdoors, at least as is written, remains subordinate to the male?Kerri is also 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. Kerri is the General Editor of Nan Shepherd’s letters, the first-ever edition of Shepherd’s, which will be published in 2023 by Edinburgh University Press. She is also a keen hill-walker and a member of Mountaineering Scotland. 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? Walking was, for Dorothy, a means of experiencing both her new-found independence and her new home”(61). Here, among an endless ruin of shattered boulders – which to Dorothy looked like the “skeletons or bones of the earth not wanted at the creation” – lies another world. It is covered, Dorothy wrote, “with never-dying lichens, which the clouds and dews nourish”. Dorothy’s account offers a glimpse of the mountain’s never-ending life, an early example of the attentiveness to detail that characterises much of women’s more recent mountain writing, particularly Nan Shepherd’s. Their walking didn’t cease upon their arrival. Walking was something they continued, sometimes out of necessity, and more often because they were drawn to what the practice yielded:

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? Dorothy’s early and tragic slip into senility cut short her ramblings, and although she didn’t receive due credit for her literary contributions, what she harvested from walking while she could provided the true essence of her life.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 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 Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, poet William Wordsworth, along with other siblings, were orphaned in 1783 when Dorothy was 12 and William 13, and were subsequently separated. In 1799, well into their twenties, Dorothy and William reunited and walked 70 miles “home,” to the Lake District in England where they were born. They arrived together and happy at their new home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere. 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.