Good afternoon everyone,

Here's something that's I've been appreciating a lot lately, it's walking. Of course this is still mostly walking in South East London although this week I must have gone a full half mile into North London!

This would be absolutely nothing to Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, though, who did a tour of the Highlands that she finished by WALKING FROM GLASGOW TO EDINBURGH, not something that I would have previously considered possible:

By the 1820s it was reasonably common for tourists to be found travelling throughout the southernmost Highlands, especially after the publication of the numerous works by Walter Scott set in the area. It was almost unheard of, though, for a foreign woman to be found walking alone, yet that is what Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt did. Without companion and only occasionally with a guide, she set off from Stirling on a week’s tour of the southern Highlands that took in many notable sights – the Falls of Leny, Loch Katrine, the Falls of Clyde – but which veered considerably at times from the standard tourist routes. During this period she covered distances of between 20 and 30 miles each day and endured considerable physical danger. In the course of her tour, Stoddart Hazlitt walked 180 miles back to Edinburgh via Lochs Katrine and Lomond and the settlements of Dumbarton and Glasgow, before a 17-mile walk in the Southern Uplands to return to her Edinburgh lodgings.

https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/women-who-walked-history

The writer of that article, Kerri Andrews, has written a whole book on women and walking. Here's an interview with her, I loved this pullquote on the experiences her subjects had that give us a new perspective on what it is to walk and what is good about walking:

Dorothy Wordsworth is invited into a female-led household and witnesses a private act of mourning over the death of a child: men would not have been allowed in. Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt has lovely conversations with local women, and Wild and Doubling Back are both full of experiences that are particular to women. Admitting that these sorts of domestic, private, familial moments are important in walking literature makes our history of walking more fully human. These moments aren't lesser because they don't (only) involve grand views and enormous danger – these are people's lived experiences possible only on foot.

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/articles/features/kerri_andrews_on_wanderers_a_history_of_women_walking-13235

These are all countryside yomps of course, so to balance that with the city, plenty to think about in this quotation from Lauren Elkin on walking in/writing about cities:

Coming from writing to flâneusing and back to writing has been about situating myself in time and space and becoming attuned to how the world is put together around me and becoming attuned to the ways in which you and me and everyone on the street are contributing to the city in a certain way. The buildings we see around us, the shapes of the streets, the obstacles of walls and gates: that’s the “hard city,” but then there’s also the “soft city,” as Jonathan Raban calls it, which is the one that we’re all creating and participating in.

https://losangelesreview.org/interview-lauren-elkin/

Love,

Alex.