Twelve years ago my book Doubling Back: Ten paths trodden in memory was originally published after a lengthy period of development. I (still) see myself principally as a fiction writer and this was my first book of non-fiction, arising from an understanding that walking was both essential to my well-being and vital to my writing and could become a subject as well as a method.
During the period of exploration (from 2007) I kept a blog, Walking and Writing, which gives some idea of the tributaries of thought and activity I followed along the way. Many of these reflections, though vital to the process, did not go into the book itself. Disastrously, Doubling Back, which had been a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, disappeared overnight with the collapse of Freight Books in 2017. It was triumphantly reborn with Saraband, with some additional material, two years ago.
It’s interesting to note how the climate for literary walking books, and women’s place in this genre, has altered in the period between the two editions. At the time of original writing and publication of Doubling Back, I was considered unusual to be writing about walking, particularly as a woman. This was particularly in the case where I took multi-day walks alone.
Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways had come out a couple of years before Doubling Back, and explored some similar territory. We had corresponded along the way to exchange ideas and experiences, but he was much quicker to find an appropriate form for his book than I was. It was perhaps The Old Ways that triggered a growth in this ‘genre’ and today there are numbers of books about all aspects of discovery and well-being on foot, many of them now by women.
Around the time of publication I was invited by Walk Highlands to be a regular columnist on their excellent online magazine. One of the pieces I wrote attempted to answer questions that women had addressed to me about taking to the paths and hills alone. My impression from walking the hills these days is that it is no longer unusual to see solitary women travelling confidently on foot.
I’m delighted that on August 6th a new anthology ‘Women, Walking’ is published by Batsford Books, put together by Kerri Andrews who has written extensively on the history of women walking, as well as on her own walking in early motherhood. This is a wonderfully refreshing offering with some excellent writers exploring diverse ‘paths’ to re-determine the meaning of walking to us. I feel proud to be rubbing shoulders with Anna Fleming, Anita Sethi, Beatrice Searle, Gail Simmons, Helen Mort, Josie Giles, Kate Davis, Katharine Norbury and Polly Atkin. These essays break down old and unhelpful ways of thinking about how we walk through the world, and claim it as ‘a way of returning ourselves to our bodies, to the core of who we are’. A separation of walking from the notion of ‘heroism’. For my own piece I took a walk as a utilitarian form of transport, in this case a humble trip to the shops.
Find more about Women, Walking here.