When Jenn Ashworth set out on Alfred Wainwright’s 192-mile coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees in the west to Robin Hood’s Bay in the east, she was stepping out of character. Her daily circular walks round Lancaster during lockdown were no real preparation, and a brief orienteering course was no guarantee that she wouldn’t get lost. She wasn’t walking for charity or running away from a marriage or, like the fell runner who’d done the route in 39 hours, trying to break any record. A homebody “inclined to slowness”, she was a 40-year-old novelist, professor and mother of two going off on her own for two-and-a-half weeks for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate.
Not that there weren’t contributory factors. Lockdown had left her with post-Covid cabin fever, itchy to be elsewhere after the long months of caring for her family and students (“a one-woman battle against entropy”). She also knew that at every pub and guest house she’d booked en route supportive letters would be waiting from her terminally ill but brilliantly animated friend Clive. Most importantly, although her walking wouldn’t be solitary, since she couldn’t avoid bumping into other (potentially annoying) hikers, she’d be “the sole owner of my own skin again”.
As she flogs herself “onwards towards impressiveness”, her journey is marked out plainly. The chapters detail the distance and destinations of each day’s walk. They also convey how brittle, sour and grumpy she can be, and how blistered and footsore she gets: she might be “off on a jolly” but there’s a price to pay, in pain and guilt. She doesn’t go in for nature writing: when she evokes “the damp green air and the heavy, alive smell of the still-wet branches and mulchy undergrowth”, it’s a plain-as-muck authentic response, not a “soft” poeticism. Maybe that’s down to her being grittily northern. She does reflect on what it means to come from the north, but her version of northern-ness isn’t Alfred Wainwright’s, whose “gruff complaining” she engages with throughout – enjoyably and sometimes scathingly.
He’s not the only fellow traveller in her head. Nor is Clive, with his letters, nor Ben, her late first husband, whose 24 marathons in 24 months, completed after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, were an amazing achievement. Mostly it’s writers she carries with her – Henry David Thoreau, William Hazlitt, Werner Herzog (who walked from Munich to Paris to see his dying mentor) and Virginia Woolf – whose ideas inspire her own. (Had it come out sooner, David Nicholls’s novel of last year covering the same route, You Are Here, might have featured too.)
What’s captivating about her book is all the thinking she does mid- or post-trek: on writing, friendship, welfare, illness, Charles Atlas, climate change, protest marches, knitting, and why it is that in popular mythology “walking women” are either models on a catwalk or sex workers. As she wanders, her mind wanders. Solvitur ambulando: she’s not sure what exactly it is she’s trying to solve by walking, but the book’s as much an invigorating mental workout as it is a hard physical trudge.
Memories surface, too, from childhood and adolescence: of a girl called Alice she knew who died in a “horrible accident” when Ashworth was 10 and whose photo she hid in a bottle; of her volunteering for the Samaritans as one of the women (Brendas, they were called) who’d listen on the phone to distressed or lonely callers, including men who’d masturbate as they talked; of how she returned to Preston from Cambridge University 34 weeks pregnant at the age of 21 and made it her home again. In her last nonfiction book, Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth devised a method that married narrative fragments with philosophising lyrical essays. Here the storyline is simpler – a walk, start to finish – but the method is much the same.
Towards the end comes the threat of failure. She loses her balance and falls – no injury is sustained, but the dizziness feels ominous. Then a heatwave arrives, making the scheduled completion of the walk impossible. The complications gather to a major health crisis, closer to home than the one affecting Clive. Mercifully, there’s an upbeat outcome, adding another layer to the motif of care. The walk that the author saw “as a break from the labour of care turned out to be a path that led me deeper into understanding my own need for it”.
“Not until we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves,” Thoreau wrote. Ashworth didn’t walk 192 miles in order to find herself. But she’s newly conscious afterwards not of her stamina and sure-footedness but of her frailty, of how “my body is more fragmented and vulnerable than I wanted it to be”. Despite her guise as an “armoured little being stomping her way across the entire country”, she’s forced to embrace a new kind of gentleness. And rather than exulting in independence, she’s back among friends and freshly available to “the traffic of love”. Chastened but buoyant, she’s stimulating to be with, her book the best kind of walking companion.