I mentioned on the play equipment thread that I was writing a book about women and the countryside and didn't want to derail that conversation, so for anyone who is interested, here's a bit about it.
The book is based around me walking two of the oldest roads in England, the Ridgeway, which runs along the chalk of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Dorset and the Harrow Way, which runs from Andover to Devon via Stonehenge. It's in part about me getting my courage back to walk alone, and about why women feel threatened in the countryside, but it's also about why women in general are meant to be at home, or in the garden, about how the countryside is not a 'natural' thing, and how so many men walk all over the countryside for books and women don't.
On a more lateral tack, it also looks at why archaeology is done by men and through men's eyes, how almost every walk I take is done to the accompaniment of gunshot because the army are everywhere around me (see also the countryside is not natural), why John Betjeman was a terrible husband and how he would have been torn to shreds on MN and much else besides.
There are some very short excerpts from it on this website:
tenderfoot.co.uk/s-walker-text/
It's just gone off to be read by someone else. I have no idea whether it is brilliant or an insane cheese dream that only I would read. We will see;
If anyone wants to read a chapter or two, I'd be happy to oblige.