Searchforthe lost women of walking
Trawling through libraries and archives, reading hundreds of biographies and letters, Annabel Abbs unearths the hidden history of women who blazed a trail by writing about their epic hiking exploits
Walking has always been in my blood. I grew up car-less: neither of my parents could drive. We lived in a remote Welsh village with limited public transport so we had to walk – everywhere and every day.
My ancestors originally came from St Abbs Head, another wild and remote corner, where they too had presumably walked for long periods of time. As far as I was concerned rural walking was nothing to do with gender. But when I started reading walking memoirs I was struck by the gaping absence of women. From Jean-jacques Rousseau to Robert Louis Stevenson to Robert Macfarlane… where on earth were the women?
At first I assumed that women of the past had chosen not to ramble or backpack for pleasure. Too dangerous, too uncomfortable, too scandalous. And yes, it was all of those things. So was this the reason so few accounts existed?trawling through libraries and archives, reading hundreds of biographies and letters, I realised that I was wrong. Dozens of women had written about arduous treks, often taken alone, frequently lugging their belongings, invariably in skirts and hobnail boots or tennis shoes (espadrilles in the case of Simone de Beauvoir), sometimes by starlight, regularly in the most inhospitable of landscapes. And always, always without GPS, mobile phones, mountain rescue services, freeze-dried meals, sun lotion, lightweight backpacks – let alone a pair of waterproof trousers.
So why don’t we know about them? For years I read, walked and pondered. When I started writing a book about the extraordinary women I’d discovered, there wasn’t space for them all. So I focused on the better known names – Georgia
O’keeffe, Simone de Beauvoir, Daphne du Maurier, Nan Shepherd, Gwen John – but I kept a log of every lost-and-found walker. Other than their gender, these women had one thing in common: the genesis of their long wild walk often lay in a personal crisis.
While men yomped for adventure, most women of the past walked, at huge risk to themselves and their reputation, to escape emotional turbulence and inner turmoil. And while men often had navigational and firearms training acquired at war, school, or from a childhood of hunting and fishing, women had to learn as they walked. Similarly, while men had the right clothing, women made do with men’s boots, skirts modified with hand-stitched drawstrings, and umbrellas. After the 18-year-old Mathilde Blind was expelled from school for questioning the bible, she hiked alone through the Alps – an extraordinary feat for a girl in 1859. In her unpublished memoir, she recalled this time as ‘the most delightful of my life’ adding that nothing in her later life could match it for ‘delicious incomparable intoxicating delight.’ Blind was constantly asked why she was alone, to which she replied with defiance: ‘Why should we always be afraid?... I’ve made up my mind to be a free woman and this is a step in that direction.’
In Sophia Matilda Holworthy’s anonymous walking memoir of 1882, she explained, ‘I went forth sad and weary, haunted by a crushing memory, and I returned marvellously revived.’ Holworthy described the other female hikers she met, including a Danish back-packer who she walked with for a few days and an English hiker who said she could no longer ‘live indoors in England because it gives her headaches and depression.’
Another of my favourites was Katherine Trevelyan who, after the death of a close friend and expulsion from Oxford University, sailed to Canada with a home-made tent, a pistol, a single change of clothes and a bunch of yellow tulips. Her mission? To walk across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, a distance of almost 3000 miles. Fortified by so much audacity, I decided to walk the routes of the women I was writing about. Tracing their paths, immersed in their writings and art, I hoped to understand how wild walking had affected them. This often meant walking alone. But it also meant sketching rather than photographing, writing letters home rather than texting, carrying my belongings on my back, walking the distances they walked, and using public transport to get around.
Secretly, I also hoped to develop a modicum of their courage. Because I’d never done anything like this before. Not all went to plan. At the very last minute I took fright at the prospect of walking alone in the Cairngorms, so I joined a ‘Nan Shepherd trek’ and did a day’s navigation course.
Later I roamed around on my own attempting to walk ‘in character’ from going barefoot to napping in the heather as Shepherd had. I discovered, ashamedly, that I don’t have an ounce of her bravery. But Shepherd’s footsteps were among the first that I traced.
By the time I walked the routes of Simone de Beauvoir in the South of France, I’d toughened up.
Beauvoir, an avid and fearless hiker who routinely covered 30 miles in a day, walked in a style all of her own: knee-length skirt, espadrilles, a basket of buns and bananas, a flask of red wine. Her memoirs are rich with vivid descriptions of her rambles, and yet few of us know her as a walker. Beauvoir, who spent hours studying military maps, believed that the simple act of plotting a walking route was a vital first step in cutting loose. She lamented how few women felt able to ‘organise a long hike on their own.’ For Beauvoir,
“I went forth sad and weary, haunted by a crushing memory, and I returned marvellously revived”
walking was an exhilarating part of her own becoming. Like the women I was following, I returned changed. Emboldened. I no longer feared being alone or lost. Long distances and challenging routes no longer intimidated me. Nor did sketching or looking at the view through my legs (another technique I’d gleaned from Shepherd). But I also returned with a deeper understanding of what drove so many women to walk, and why this sparked an empowering and enduring love of being on foot.
The history of walking has been skewed to the male stride. Fortunately this is starting to change: growing numbers of past female walkers are being resurrected in books, articles and essays.
Why does this matter? Because the courage of others is contagious. These women give us the confidence to pack a bag and head off – whatever the weather or terrain, and whoever and wherever we are.
Perhaps the last word should go to the forgotten writer and walker, Clara Vyvyan, who followed the Rhone from source to sea (a three-month walk) at the age of 67.
‘I wanted more than ever to be alone,’ she wrote before leaving. ‘I wanted to stride away… to go where there would be no intimates, only valleys and mountains and strangers.’ Vyvyan returned home ‘with a feeling of deep peace,’ hiking the Cornish lanes until she died, aged 90.