She is so confident that their walking informed their art that Abbs sets out to retrace the steps of women “for whom rural or wild walking had proved life-changing.” She chooses eight women: Frieda von Richthofen, Gwen John, Clara Vyvyan, Daphne du Maurier, Nan Shepherd, Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Gatewood, and Georgia O’Keefe. But research, for Abbs, is more than reading. Abbs spends time in archives, and Windswept is replete with references to diaries and letters. It seems fitting, then, that Abbs includes “Big Walks” in her research process.

In fact, Abbs’s Twitter bio proclaims her an “obsessive walker, cook, reader.” She grew up car-less in Wales and walked until the act became part of her identity. When Abbs realized all the books about walking on her nightstand were written by men, she wondered: where were these men’s wives and mothers? In Windswept, she asks, “Could it be that the absent women were creating the very homes that enabled these men to step out with such nonchalance and exuberance?” Abbs’s certainty that women too must have walked in the wild drives her into the archives to find out.Ībbs herself is a chronic walker. To harness their creativity and unearth inner peace. Men walked to find inspiration, solace, absolution. Women have walked to survive for as long as we have existed.īut the more women were relegated to home, the less they could walk in the wild. Water, firewood, and food could only be gathered by walking, and women had to walk to visit family or friends and take wares to sell at the market. And, once agriculture bound women to specific portions of land, women still walked to survive. Walking is in our “molecular memories,” Annabel Abbs insists in her new book Windswept, “carved indelibly into our DNA.” For thousands of years, women in hunter-gatherer societies walked as many as ten miles a day.

Annabel abbs windswept