writing women back into the countryside: a book

[makespaceforgirls]

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.

I do tend to get epically lost and a bit superstitious out in the wilds. It all goes a bit Blair Witch. Fear of monsters as much as madmen. And of course, since having children, the walks are very short, ciricular, close to home. And anxiety impacts, too. I have a friend who writes on walking and we have also discussed disability and mental health in this context, too.

Love the 'lone enraptured male' trope! (Not love, but it rings so true).

I wouldn't be scared as such, but walking out of the door and striding off into a line adventure is certainly harder for women. We are conditioned to hold so much of other people's lives in our consiousness that it would take a concerted effort to get childcare, paperwork, household in order to escape the 'wife work' that it's not possible for most women to see this kind of adventure as possible. Pretty sure men can easily close the front door and stride off knowing someone will feed the dog/kids/meter much more so than women. Very interested in examining that and pulling it apart OP

Before my early thirties and kids I don't believe in the 'pram in the hall' as enemy of creativity concept. But now I do see that it's something to battle against.

Basically what I'm saying is that a woman can go on an adventure on her own, but they are definitely making much more of a point by doing it.

Also OP have you considered going on Claire Baldwin's 'ramblings' on radio 4?

I shall have to go and read your blog.

I've lived rurally most of my life and have walked the countryside solo since I was about ten. I'll walk in the pre-dawn dark to give the dogs a run before work. Very rarely have I felt threatened, and I've only had two bad experiences in all those years (unpleasant, rather than terrifying). I feel much more anxious in cities TBH. I've had some great conversations with lone men - bird watching, pest control, the exact ancestry of a working lurcher.

The only thing I'd say, OP, is when you talk about gunshots, just check that you're actually near a military training area. Most live firing you hear in the countryside is either game shooting or pest control. And sometimes - and I am sure you know this - what sounds like gunfire can just be a bird scarer.

PS I do get what PP say about the Lone Man in the Wilds and women being much more constrained by DC. When mine were small finding time to walk the dogs properly was a struggle, and the idea of just sodding off hiking for a weekend unthinkable.

I go for walks alone, but I almost never see other women doing the same when I'm out. Couples, groups of women, lone men, yes, but usually if I do see another woman on her own, she'll be running, not walking. It makes me feel like a bit of an oddball, like I'm breaking some unspoken rule of the countryside. It can't be that every single other woman in the vicinity has caring responsibilities, so I do wonder what's going on sometimes.

I've been thinking about this today and your 'men walking out' are no different to male mountaineers, trans-Atlantic rowers, round the world cyclists, artists or poets but also all those everyday blokes with ordinary jobs, who take up marathon running, cycling, golf, or club cricket, as soon as their first baby is born. (Plenty of source material on 'the cyclists' on MN!). I mean it's just ordinary, everyday male selfishness and sexism, not anything specific to walking

@lottiegarbanzo I agree, I just happen to be writing about walking, with incidental asides about MAMILS and other ways of getting away from home. Although walking does seem to generate a lot more books written by men about what they do, which is one of the things I find irritating.

My favourite example of it though are Father's Day celebrations in Germany. Do they celebrate this with their children, or their parents? Hell, no. The men get a large trolley, fill it with beer and go for a walk in the woods.

@Haggisfish I am very jealous of that.

@jamaisjedors Yes, loved it, really poetic, but oh she is such a different person to me that it feels like a dispatch from another planet.

I wouldn't be scared as such, but walking out of the door and striding off into a line adventure is certainly harder for women. We are conditioned to hold so much of other people's lives in our consiousness that it would take a concerted effort to get childcare, paperwork, household in order to escape the 'wife work' that it's not possible for most women to see this kind of adventure as possible. Pretty sure men can easily close the front door and stride off knowing someone will feed the dog/kids/meter much more so than women. Very interested in examining that and pulling it apart OP

@Missproportionate And with that you have very exactly summarised one thread of the book better than I have managed so far. Does Robert McFarlane have a single one of these thoughts? I rather suspect not.

And yes, if it gets published i would love to go for a walk with Claire Baldwin.

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789143423

looks interesting, a history of women walking

@GrumpyMiddleAgedWoman A lot of my walking was near the Salisbury Plain Training Area, so not just gunshots but shelling and machine gun fire. On a bad day it sounded like they were putting down the insurrection in Iraq. You can hear this from 20 miles away round here if the weather is right, and the way to tell the difference between shelling and thunder is that thunder doesn't stop for lunch...

But yes, there were also clay pigeon shoots too; I used to get taken to these as a child because my father went to these.

And then there are the remnants of the army which lurk all over the countryside: cold war bomb shelters, memorials to crashed aircraft, the crumbling remains of old camps, pillboxes and tank stops....

Sounds fascinating and I look forward to reading it.

I do think a lot of female fear is media generated. Im aware when I'm in a local place that gives me the heebies (small dead end lane with high hedges and no way out) that I'm imagining some ITV crime drama in my head rather than reality). But wherever it comes from, yes there are far more women who literally won't do anything alone, than men. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of competent and unafraid women going solo in all sorts of situations.

Regarding archaeology, there was some stuff in the news a while ago about sexual harassment of female archaeologists/archaeology students on digs, typically by more senior male archaeologists, which seemed quite a common issue - in some cases also with implied threats to their studies if they spoke out (sorry I can't remember any more detail!).

I know a couple of women who are very much doing their own thing and I admire them so much.

One is what I suppose you could call an experimental archaeologist and the other is an artist. So in one sense, they fulfil that whole 'middle class things in the country' role, on the other hand they are both down to earth, and the artist grew up in an Essex council house and still struggles with imposter syndrome at times.

The artist (theatrical arts) has been funded to lead a group on a walk from London to the UN climate change conference in Glasgow this summer as a nature pilgrimage/arts event.

Lovely thread. Especially during lockdown!

I'd buy your book OP. Your writing is very engaging.

I agree.

A lovely thread

I'd buy your book.

@GrumpyMiddleAgedWoman

I shall have to go and read your blog.

I've lived rurally most of my life and have walked the countryside solo since I was about ten. I'll walk in the pre-dawn dark to give the dogs a run before work. Very rarely have I felt threatened, and I've only had two bad experiences in all those years (unpleasant, rather than terrifying). I feel much more anxious in cities TBH. I've had some great conversations with lone men - bird watching, pest control, the exact ancestry of a working lurcher.

The only thing I'd say, OP, is when you talk about gunshots, just check that you're actually near a military training area. Most live firing you hear in the countryside is either game shooting or pest control. And sometimes - and I am sure you know this - what sounds like gunfire can just be a bird scarer.

I was going to say that when I hear gun shots I usually assume there's a clay pigeon shoot nearby!

I am a woman who loves being alone, but who also fears walking / being alone in the countryside.

As several people have asked where this fear comes from, I'll try to explain. My fear is definitely of being alone, far away from anywhere / anyone and meeting a man / several men who want to harm me. The idea of trying to escape, particularly on foot, from a man, perhaps in a car or van, fills me with fear. Even thinking about it is stressful.

Now, is that a rational fear? I'm not sure. From a statistical point of view, the chance of that actually happening is pretty minute; but the chance of a bad outcome if that scenario occurred is definitely non-zero. In most other aspects of my life, if the probability of something occurring is minute, I tend to ignore it (eg there is a minute chance of getting Covid from a plastic bag, but I'm not bothered about washing/disinfecting all my shopping), so from this perspective it's irrational.

On the other hand, from personal experience, I have had several dodgy experiences with men when doing solo sport. For example, the group of men in a jeep on an empty country road who asked if I would like to come to the barn with them so they could help me fix a puncture on a long solo ride (answer hell no!); or the man who stopped his car to ask for directions when I was running and opened his car door to block the pavement; or the man who stood in the bushes at the edge of a park at night, only visible by the light of his cigarette, and who then crossed the park to intersect with me in a darker section of the path. Maybe all of these experiences were benign and I just projected my fear onto them, but they definitely felt scary.

On a third hand (foot?), I also think that there is psychologically more to this than either a dispassionate risk assessment or media generated fear. I spent years in a controlling relationship in which I convinced myself that an abusive man was the love of my life. When I was in that relationship, I ignored, suppressed and denied any feelings of fear about my partner, despite him posing a larger threat to my safety than any hypothetical dark stranger on a lonely hillside. I wonder if my fears about being alone and powerless when alone are a projection and externalisation of my suppressed fear and isolation in that relationship? Answer: probably yes.

So the conclusion for me is that yes, my fear is irrational, but pointing out the irrationality isn't what helps address it. And when women are conditioned (gaslit?) to deny and minimise feelings of fear in the personal sphere, when they are instructed to dismiss their instincts (he didn't mean it like that), when society feels unsafe for women -- maybe those fears get projected onto other, more socially accepted scenarios, giving us the bogeymen, axe murderers and slendermen of our modern mythology.

@makespaceforgirls, that's good!

And yes, agreed about the army. We have near here the remains of two WWII encampments, sundry pillboxes, a barn built from stone formerly used for a barracks (Napoleonic), the traces of various airfields and dragon's teeth used to block gaps in fences.

@GrumpyMiddleAgedWoman

I shall have to go and read your blog.

I've lived rurally most of my life and have walked the countryside solo since I was about ten. I'll walk in the pre-dawn dark to give the dogs a run before work. Very rarely have I felt threatened, and I've only had two bad experiences in all those years (unpleasant, rather than terrifying). I feel much more anxious in cities TBH. I've had some great conversations with lone men - bird watching, pest control, the exact ancestry of a working lurcher.

The only thing I'd say, OP, is when you talk about gunshots, just check that you're actually near a military training area. Most live firing you hear in the countryside is either game shooting or pest control. And sometimes - and I am sure you know this - what sounds like gunfire can just be a bird scarer.

This has been my experience too, including walking the dog as a lone teenager.

During my years in London I had an unpleasant experience practically every week: men rubbing up against me or touching on the tube, drunk blokes on the bus when I was coming home from the theatre, men exposing themselves to me in train carriages late at night, being cat-called and propositioned in broad daylight.

Yes, out walking on my own I've met the occasional oddball, but no man has ever approached me and tried to touch me or propositioned me. I have female friends who run cross-country before dawn on their own, know a lone women who walks the dogs before and after work in the dark on the hillsides in the Brecon Beacons. I know a woman who runs walking holidays for women and does all her route-planning and recces in advance on her own.

The Ridgeway is lovely but it's really not comparable to the Pacific Crest Trail. Whenever I've done bits of it they've been busy with walkers, mountain bikers and horse-riders.

Have you done any research into actual risks and crime rates, OP? I think that women are pretty bad at assessing risk and very good at catching fear. I get really tired of books about 'how I learned to conquer my fear' when those fears aren't rational in the first place and the book makes previously fearless women wonder whether they need to be scared.

My guess is that the biggest danger to solo walkers is spraining an ankle or falling. Not other people.

Thank you for a really interesting thread. Look forward to the book OP, keep us posted. I've noted some of the books PPs have mentioned too.

Re: archaeology, I've seen a couple of things recently which has highlighted the bias - many of the earliest examples of cave painting art are now thought to have been done by women. They were always assumed to have been done by men, and therefore the smaller handprints must have been those of boys. And the skeletons in the Oseberg Viking Ship burial (recently subject of a programme by Janina Ramirez) turned out to be female, much to everyone's surprise...

Watching with interest and I’d love to read your book!

I’m really interested in this as I walk a lot as a lone woman, both in forested areas and rural areas and I have rarely felt threatened. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to me to until someone made a comment to my husband about wasn’t he worried that I was off walking for hours by myself in isolated areas. Aside from the fact that weirdly, I wasn’t consulted, I realised that I wasn’t. I’ve even walked in the forest at night by myself.

I don’t want to sound like I’m trivialising the concerns of other women about walking alone, quite the opposite.

I also run, but I prefer running in the dark because people can’t see me to catcall me (I’m slow and fat). Until a couple of years ago, I used to run on a hard track around a local lake but stopped because groups of teenage boys would congregate and several times started catcalling me, pretending to run after me and taking photos of me. When I complained about it on Facebook, a surprising number of other local women said the same thing.

I’d love to run away from pavements and traffic and people, but forest paths and bridleways are too muddy at the moment.

I love the sound of this book and would definitely buy it! Good luck OP

Hi op this sounds really interesting, I’d love to read a couple of chapters. I’ll pm you.

"invisible dragon". I don't think your response is irrational. One way to think about outcomes is to separate out the frequency from the severity. The chances of being attacked in the countryside are pretty low, but the severity of an attack could be very high. You could fall and injure yourself. The frequency would probably be higher and severity lower than an attack. It is good to analyze risk and figure out how and if it can be mitigated.

I also recommend the film 'Wild' to anyone on this thread who hasn't seen it, or anyone on FWR. It made me want to walk the Pacific Crest Trial. Seeing this narrative from a female perspective was such a pleasure when the default is always male. It deals head-on with what it's like to be a solo female walker. Glad to discover there are other fans out there!

I have always had a problem with Bear Grylls and similar for the reasons you mention - who's looking after his children while he's out enjoying himself having a really tough time in the wild? I'm unable to enjoy the programmes when the realities of home and family are erased. I find it difficult to respect these 'adventurers' when the whole quest seems so self-centred.

Your writing is great OP. Thank you for sharing, and I wish you all the best.

Just discovered this thread and it sounds really interesting OP.

@invisibledragon I can relate to what you said. I love walking on my own but I am also scared. A few years ago I was on my own and met a man who told me he was going to rape me. He didn't. Apparently it was a joke. For a while it made me extremely nervous of being alone and I often think about it when choosing which path to walk. I bet he never thought about it again.

When lockdown ends I am planning on doing a five day walk with a friend but she can only accompany me for part of it. I really want to do it though.

By the way, I remember reading about an elderly woman who loved walking near me. She would just start out on her own and walk for days with very little equipment or supplies but she knew what she was doing, despite the fact that some people wanted to write her off as old and vulnerable.