Women Walking

Unrecorded, unsung, unknown women walking. For transport, for leisure, for exercise, for sanity. Just to get out of the house.

It costs your time but not your coin. It’s a choice to stay or go. To walk alone or in company.

My mother loved to walk. She connected to the countryside known since childhood.

“We gathered rosehips here,” she said. “And found parachutes during the war. My first kiss in these woods.”

In the end I could only drive her to these places to view the memory sites. She never said what she felt then. Her request to scatter her ashes on the downs at a place we often walked together means that corner, that view, is always her place and I acknowledge her as I pass. Up in the wild wind with the skylarks, close to the Saxon settlement and the Bronze Age burials. She is there as long as we remember.

Her parents loved to walk this countryside too. Names like talismen: Locksash and Exton, woods and heaths, farms and fields, they had walkers’ knowledge of them all.

On the other side of my family, my great-grandmother Emily Mary Ann Dorothy, an urban woman to her core, walked Bushy and Richmond parks for exercise and solace, and to connect with the world beyond the house, shops and sewing machine. Perhaps she passed Virginia Woolf around a corner.

Before her, before London, Sarah Rees walked to the capital from Wales. Keeping pace with drovers bringing their beasts to market. Their regular ways across country to known resting places, fields for the stock overnight, a campfire, a haystack.

So my walking continues the path. We have all walked and made our journeys. For me it’s about the new and unknown. The risk of weather, insult, injury or losing the way.

And it’s the known and the remembered, each place recalled from another time, another life.

Paths and steps, walking up a story.

If you would like to read more about women walking: Wanderers. A history of women walking by Kerri Andrews