The Hard Way

The Hard Way is a powerful, personal story melding nature writing with feminism, history and folklore which gives a new perspective on the English countryside and traces the untold stories of the women who walked it, from history to present day.

"All I wanted to do was go out for a walk. Plenty of men do this all the time and quite often they write books about it too. But walking away from home turns out to be more difficult if you are a woman." 

Susannah Walker set out to find the path of two of the oldest roads in Britain, first the Ridgeway beyond Avebury and then the less-known Harrow Way, which passes Stonehenge as it heads to the Devon Coast. But on the way she also discovered the stories of other women, from the Iron Age to the twentieth century, who become her companions on her journey.

Among them, there's Penelope Betjeman, wife of the well-known poet, and an avid adventurer who had very good reason to get away from home and the Edwardian feminists Ella Noyes - writer and explorer of both the wild valleys of Italy and her Wiltshire home - and Helen Thomas, kept at home by her husband Edward while he went out walking. She passes the sites excavated by another Edwardian, Maud Cunnington, a trailblazer for women and pioneer of modern archaeology, and along the way also meets Margaret Nash, the suffragette and writer who ended up devoting her life to her artist husband, and Tirzah Garwood, another talented woman who discovered that marriage to Eric Ravilious left her little time for her own work.

Along the route, Susannah also uncovered some clues among the tracks and hillforts as to why these strong women ended up domesticated and so forgotten; tales of sheep, harvest and Thomas Hardy, of stags horns and white horses, grinding corn and battles that never were.

These stories twisted together, urging Susannah forward but also making her see these southern English landscapes through different eyes. And as she walked, she began to understand how the countryside, feminism and history were all irretrievably connected to her journey back to herself. 

"As old as the Ridgeway, The Harrow Way turned out to be much harder to trace on the ground – the right kind of path for a complicated middle of life. My journey along this road was interrupted by traffic, the pandemic and my own fears and uncertainties. And all the way I was hoping for an answer. But when I got to the end I found something else entirely: a new beginning."

Image credits: Cover Design by Mecob using photograph by David Daniels. Book designs, cover and other images are for illustrative purposes and may differ from final design.