{"id":21189,"date":"2020-09-10T12:52:41","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T12:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/?p=21189"},"modified":"2026-05-05T08:19:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T08:19:38","slug":"wanderers-a-history-of-women-walking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wanderers-a-history-of-women-walking\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanderers – A History of Women Walking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new book by Kerri Andrews, Wanderers examines the history of female walking by looking at ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their lives. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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In a series of intimate portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson\u2019s daughter Elizabeth Carter \u2013 who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England \u2013 to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kerri Andrews is a writer, keen hill walker and also the general editor of Nan Shepherd\u2019s letters. Here she provides an exclusive edited extract from Wanderers. There’s also 20% discount for Walkhighlands readers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWalking and writing are both fundamentally empathetic activities. Literature connects \u2018us to the lives of others\u2019, Linda Cracknell writes, and it has evident parallels with pedestrianism: walking \u2018\u201cin someone else\u2019s shoes\u201d [\u2026] and on their paths connects one to their stories\u2019. This is central to Cracknell\u2019s attempts in her book, Doubling Back<\/em>, to connect with the father she long ago lost. But she is also conscious of the importance of walking to her own creative practice, where it enables her to \u2018think better on the move, think more creatively [\u2026] Attentive to both inner and outer landscapes\u2019, and so Cracknell also seeks to follow other women for whom walking mattered in order to connect her story to theirs. The first is Jessie Kesson, the Scottish novelist, poet, and BBC Radio playwright who lived, for a time in the 1930s, above Loch Ness at Achbuie. A friend of Nan Shepherd\u2019s in later life, Kesson wrote frequently about her experiences wandering the hillsides above the Great Glen in a number of her novels as well as her radio plays. These wanderings enabled Kesson to find solace in the land after a year\u2019s incarceration in a mental hospital following a chaotic childhood. Walking for Kesson was a means of reconnecting with herself, something she learned as a young child while on the move with her much-loved but troubled mother. Later Kesson would write that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cdrop in on\u201d in the passing. Not us. Never us. The countryside itself was the magnet that drew us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kesson \u2018haunted\u2019 the landscape around Achbuie too for the six months that she lived there, \u2018boarded out\u2019, as Cracknell records, to live with \u2018an elderly woman on her croft\u2019. There Kesson was able to \u2018ramble freely\u2019, with no walls to contain her. Not needing a destination to wander, she simply walked where she would, and, as a result, Cracknell finds that \u2018The visceral thrill of the place in springtime pulses through her writing in different genres ever after.\u2019 Kesson wove her experiences above Loch Ness into a number of writings, from magazine pieces to poems. In them she explores the physical qualities of the place with a minuteness of attention that suggests how thoroughly she had come to \u2018learn\u2019 the place through her walking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cA high hill-slope nine miles west of Inverness. It is curious \u2013 up there where one is surrounded by crags, deep gulleys and all the sterner stuff that goes to make a hill \u2013 to find Springs so profuse, and green, and gentle. It would be hard to find one bit of brown earth on that hillside in April, for bracken, rightly called \u2018lovely curse\u2019 by Highland folk, spreads like a vast, young, strong plantain, and all through the bracken, in countless multitudes, cluster primroses that are thick and yellow and smelling like spice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The hill is composed of red rock, and in clear, Spring sunlight the rocks glow like fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018a painted ocean\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spring in the hills would confront the greatest artist with too vast a panorama. I doubt if he could ever capture it. For Spring there is more than colour; it is music and scent. The burns literally hum down the hillside, the trees have rhythm in their shaking. The smell of Spring in the hills is a blending of peaty thickness, bracken-mould, flowers\u2019 spicyness, and clean, quick purge of the wind. Down in the hollows anenomes, bereft of smell, gleam in pale patches.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s case, she became attuned to the unique \u2018rhythm\u2019 of each tree\u2019s susurration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in spring that Cracknell comes to Achbuie, eager to bring herself into some sort of contact with Kesson\u2019s \u2018powerful influence\u2019, to \u2018share her exuberance\u2019 for life and for walking. On the hillside above Loch Ness, Cracknell begins to imagine a young Kesson romping across the landscape, its \u2018precipitous pathways of loose rock\u2019 offering danger and challenge to her and to the young children who followed Kesson about. As Cracknell herself explores this place these imaginings become more substantial, so that the landscape becomes haunted in an eerie echo of Kesson\u2019s characterisation of her early wanderings. Climbing higher onto the moor, Cracknell writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe wind carved down the lochside, and the bare birches rang maroon against a clear sky. Deer poured uphill on winter-dusky heather whose wiry stems snapped at my bootlaces. I kept turning, wondering whose step it was that caught at the back of mine, half expecting to find a line of children in a giggling retreat.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But it is by imagining herself into Kesson\u2019s feelings, as she walked for the first time on this hillside after her release from hospital, that Cracknell populates the place. The spring air buzzes with sound, from the \u2018Birdsong bubbles\u2019 to the \u2018buzzard-mewls\u2019, to the \u2018Soft unexplained pops\u2019 which \u2018rise from the grass\u2019, just as it did when Kesson trod the ground here: the seventy years between the two are erased by the infinitely recurring spring symphony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI imagine Jessie Kesson stepping from the deadened enclosure and stale air of the mental hospital into this cacophony of sound and the sense of elevation. Coming from a regimented institution with every thought and activity crowded by other lives, this could hardly have failed to provoke her free spirit and to animate her feet in exploration. Perhaps it recalled her to those barefoot walks with her mother and a sense of inhabiting again her wild self.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Cracknell is also attentive to the \u2018music\u2019 of the place and seeks to know the hillside as Kesson did by composing a detailed aural topography that is sensitive to the subtle variations in tone and sound. Descending from the high moorland Cracknell searches for the exact way Kesson came down from the croft. Once \u2018Sure of Jessie\u2019s route down the burn\u2019, Cracknell retraces the older woman\u2019s steps down secretive and cunning paths:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI cross the burn, follow the lane a little south, wondering where Jessie would have found the next part of her descent. And there, between one burn and the next is a gate and a path marked by a scattered line of brown leaves, leading down between trees. It is unremarked on the map and delights me with the soft secrecy of its way. Here there is soprano birch leaf and the bronzy tenor of the first clusters of oak leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Cracknell is willing to use her body as Kesson did, to use ears and mind to listen with attention and discrimination to the mellifluous and multi-tonal \u2018music\u2019 of the burns. Consequently she moves beyond mere imagination to reanimation by bringing to life once more the sensations and experiences enjoyed by Kesson. At the end of her walk Cracknell feels like she has \u2018brushed shoulders with a character\u2019 in the \u2018green song-tunnels beside the burn\u2019. For a time Cracknell\u2019s use of her body \u2013 from her feet to her ears \u2013 is able to recreate something of Kesson\u2019s physical presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extracted from\u00a0Wanderers: A History of Women Walking<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Kerri Andrews, published by Reaktion Books. Copyright \u00a9 Kerri Andrews 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new book by Kerri Andrews, Wanderers examines the history of female walking by looking at ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their lives.  In a series of intimate portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson\u2019s daughter Elizabeth Carter \u2013 who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England \u2013 to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia…<\/span> <\/p>\n

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