A book about women and taking up space and how manly men do nature writing

[Iwrotesomething]

I would not, honestly, usually do this kind of self promotion but I am a long time, name changing denizen of this place and in my defence a) I mentioned this on another thread and people were interested and b) @Boiledbeetle is reading it and told me to do it and so I had to. Also, you might like it.

It's called The Hard Way, and the narrative is me walking some of the oldest roads in England, but while doing that thinking about why it is hard for women to walk alone, why they are meant to stay at home while men stride out and write about nature, and all the artists are men too. And then I discovered that there were all sorts of great women but either they had to shell peas for the Male Great Artists or we forgot that they wrote anything.

Also gerbils. But this username will self-destruct after this thread.

Looking forward to this. I walk a lot but I also don't walk to places I'd like to due to fear/lack of time etc!

ooo thank you for this. Am off out over the weekend to walk up various mountains in Westmoreland, and will add this to my reading list, after I finish Rachel Hewitt's and Kerri Andrews' books on women in nature.

People are always a bit surprised when I say I'm off up a mountain on the weekend - surely it's quite normal to walk up Helvellyn or Skiddaw ?

I also walk and travel alone, and see plenty of other lone female and male hikers. It wouldn't occur to me not to tbh.

This looks great. My copy arrives tomorrow 😍

This looks like my kind of book. Ordered.😊

boiled, I think you’ve just written a poem! This sounds like a Lynn Peters poem=

I'm not a walker.
Unless from the living to the kitchen counts.
Sometimes I even take the scenic route and walk round the dining room table.

Genius.
Sydney carton thanks for showing us this, love her stuff!

Has anyone read any of Christina Dodwell's books? Her first adventure was to cross Africa from Algeria to South Africa, most of it with a female friend. They started out with two male friends in a Landrover who flogged the vehicle at Kano without warning and sodded off. They did give the two women their share of the proceeds at least and they decided to carry on. Part of the adventure was to canoe down the Ubangui River into the Congo.

I heartily recommend Travels with Fortune – an African Adventure by her.

@YellowAsteroid less so if you live in the South West... I did go to the highest point in Wiltshire for the book though

My copy of The Hard Way has arrived!
I'm really looking forward to a good read with tea and Tunnocks in a shady corner of the garden.

Thanks for this, I'd like to read it.

This discomfort about walking alone in the country you describe resonated strongly with me. There are several big commons with long grass and lots of bushes where I live and, having woken at 5.30 am on the day before the solstice, the morning was so beautiful, I couldn't resist going out for a walk.

I met only two men and no other people but both men reacted nervously to me and one said 'you don't usually meet people up here at this time of day' which could have meant anything but it made ME nervous. I love going for walks on my own but feel that a dog legitimises your presence and without one you look odd. It shouldn't feel like that.

Just reading a sample on Amazon, definitely ordering. It reminded me of Maggie O'Farrells book, I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, one of them was coming across a man on a walk, who subsequently murdered a woman he met in the countryside. Maggie O'Fs story is about listening to her intuition and coming within a whisker of not being able to escape.

I loved that book by Maggie O'Farrell @IthinkIamAnAlien and agree with what you've said about walking alone in the countryside. I go walking with my H but would never go on my own whereas he goes off quite happily without even thinking about it. I envy that ability to not even have to think about it.

YellowAsteroid · 21/06/2024 17:58

surely it's quite normal to walk up Helvellyn or Skiddaw ?

Do they slate you?

Yes @IthinkIamAnAlien I feel like that about a dog too. I feel okay out running, though age and injury means I don't do that so much, but I feel more vulnerable and self-conscious walking.

Oddly, this was one of the reason I followed old roads. They follow the tops of ridges mostly, so you can see for miles, and hardly anyone else uses them, so they ended up feeling quite safe.

Shall take a look, love this sort of thing. Just finished In Her Nature which was insightful and brilliant too.

I love walking solo and have started going on hiking and camping trips with just my baby too.

I think I've read one of hers about Kamchatka? It was very good.

Does anyone else get pissed off with Robert Macfarlane? He's always off having great adventures, and occasionally will stop to get a little emotional about how much he's missing his kids. Meaning that his wife is presumably at home doing all the unfun and unglamorous stuff 🙄

Compare and contrast with Dervla Murphy, who simply took her 9 year old daughter with her to walk the length of Peru! (single mum by choice in the 1960s, living in the West Bank and writing about it in her late 70s- the woman was a legend).

For a very female take on travel and the natural world, I recommend "Wild" by Jay Griffiths.

I also have to add that I have very little fear of men while out in the wilds- hikers are usually decent types. In fact, I got rescued by a group of male hikers the other weekend when I got impressively lost looking for the coast path, and finally found it, with me at the top of a 10ft drop above it. They helped me down, which was nice of them although it did dent my pride a bit 😳

Compare and contrast with Dervla Murphy, who simply took her 9 year old daughter with her to walk the length of Peru!

And Madagascar. Cracking book.

When I was a student and hitching around the coastline of Ireland, I made a small pilgrimage to Dervla Murphy's home town and stayed in the local An Oige youth hostel. Someone kindly pointed out her house, but I was way too shy to knock and say hello. She was a massive inspiration to me and I got braver and travelled further.

This is just anecdotal observation, but I've noticed that other people seem more comfortable with me walking alone if I'm carrying a day pack. As if a day pack confers credibility/purpose!

I loved your book, I walk alone regularly and much of what you described resonated with me. I also did the three peaks last year, just to see if I could and that really confused people, if you do leave the house it has to be for a higher purpose: charity or something, not just because you wanted to see what it would be like. It was brilliant:)

So I’ve often thought that it should be legal for a woman walking alone to carry a gun. Preferably two. And if used in self-defence, sentences should be extremely light if visible at all, just in case they damaged the great career potential she may have in the future.

Oh I’m definitely being tongue-in-cheek, how could you think anything else 😑

Just been on to order it and they're was a pleasingly coloured display of books at the top of the page!

I bought her a pint in Galway once. She was very cool.

OP, I’m with @ElleneAsanto in that, while the book looks great (and I used to live in Oxford, get the bus to Wantage and walk quite a bit on the Ridgeway, so nice to have those memories recalled 25 years on), I don’t recognise the fear of being outdoors walking in the country from my own experience at all. I’m not a particularly brave individual, and I’ve been mugged at knifepoint (when living in London), but when I lived in rural England on the edge of a village, I walked by myself all the time, or with my baby in a backpack, including in the early hours of the morning if I couldn’t sleep, with a head torch. Despite it being a village of dog owners, everyone appeared to walk their dogs on the football pitch, not on field paths, and I almost never saw another person.

I’ve only ever encountered this fear on Mn, where I find it unnecessarily self-limiting and often illogical. Absolutely, should you encounter a violent or predatory individual in a remote rural area, there would be no one to help, but the chances of meeting said individual are almost nil. There are far easier, less effort-intensive ways for them to find a victim than to drive to the nearest parking spot, walk for miles on deserted field paths and hope a lone woman passes within hours, or days.

Cows, on the other hand, are an actual menace, and I’ve had one or two terrifying near-misses (bullocks, not cows with calves). But this isn’t gendered — cows kill both sexes.

Best wishes with sales!

Dervla was definitely a pints kind of woman! According to journalists who travelled from afar to interview her, she would request foreign bottles and tasty cheeses as part exchange!

There are times when I've travelled and walked in remote foreign parts of Asia and felt no fear. There are times when I have walked locally in England and felt uncomfortable around macho individuals with zero control over their untrained dogs, so it all depends really.

Of course it's better to travel courageously but life happens and people can become anxious through life's assorted vicissitudes, so I appreciate the stance of Op. A lot of male travel writing was in the heroic mode, all adventure, adrenaline and tales of daring and some female travel writers have mimicked this. For this reason I appreciate a different approach including those taking a long and thoughtful time to complete a journey, rather than a hasty scramble from A to B.