Pathfinding

The desire to walk is something that defines us as human beings, bringing joy and connection and freedom. But what happens to all this when we become mothers?
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In the wake of the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother, Kerri Andrews determines to undertake a series of journeys on foot to understand what has happened to her.
Alongside a backpack full of supplies, Kerri carries with her the shadow of post-natal depression and the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for those, like her, who bear the mental and physical scars of childbearing and childrearing. Yet, what she soon discovers are tales of mother-walkers that have long been neglected or hidden away. From Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton to Kate Chopin, here are women whose post-partum stories are urgently pertinent as they show us how to step into new ways of living with motherhood.
As Kerri traverses urban, rural and increasingly mountainous landscapes in the North West and Scotland, she is joined by women who have also experienced the profound and sometimes devastating changes that having children can bring to bodies and minds. Together, they explore the complicated ground of motherhood today - balancing enormous responsibility and upheaval with ambition, rage and hope - creating new paths as they go.
Melding history, landscape writing and memoir, Pathfinding is a deeply personal, brave and urgent exploration of what it truly means to rediscover ourselves through the land we walk and the people we walk alongside. Here are our fore-mothers who have pursued power and pleasure through their feet; here is an invitation to mothers today to set out and claim that same power and freedom.
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'Dazzling, inspirational' Helen Mort on Wanderers

KERRI ANDREWS is a writer, walker and academic with a PhD in women's literature. She is the author of Pathfinding: On Walking and Motherhood; Wanderers: A History of Women Walking and the editor of Way Makers: An Anthology of Women's Writing About Walking, as well as the first ever collection of Nan Shepherd's letters. She lives in Scotland with her two young children, but it was in the Yorkshire Dales that she discovered the delights of walking, before falling in love first with the Lake District and then the Scottish mountains. She is a member of Mountaineering Scotland and has so far climbed over 120 of Scotland's Munros.