Women In The Hills, c. 1800 to Present

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The Women In The Hills (WITH) Network will bring together scholars, creative practitioners and stakeholders, across a range of disciplines and sectors, concerned with the contexts that shape women's land use from c. 1800 to the present day. This inter-disciplinary, cross-sector collaboration will generate an unprecedentedly holistic, nuanced exploration of factors that define, hinder and promote women's engagements with land.When hymn-writer Frances Havergal wrote in 1871 about a recent mountaineering adventure that she 'did not know till the summer before last what a combination of keen enjoyment and benefit to health...was to be found in a pedestrian tour by unprotected females,' she identified (a) that women constitute a distinct community of land users, whose values, beliefs, experiences and representations, about land use frequently differ from a male-biased norm, and (b) that recognition of such diversity in experiences of land use promotes positive outcomes in health and wellbeing.WITH's explorations will focus on women's walking, running and climbing in UK uplands, from the flourishing of outdoor leisure in c. 1800 to the present. WITH's discussion of historical and contemporary barriers and incentives to women's participation will be structured around three focal categories: (a) female bodies, (b) women's social circumstances, (c) women as makers and recipients of decisions about land management. Within this exploration, arts and humanities research will (a) historicise factors that hinder or promote women's participation, (b) explore literary and visual artefacts as evidence of women's participation, (c) analyse those artefacts' aesthetics as evidence for how women constitute a distinct community of creative landscape practitioners, (d) assess the impact of historical representations on contemporary women's land use, and (e) disseminate women's representations of land use to challenge the historical marginalisation of women's voices in this genre. WITH will facilitate conversations between scholars in women's writing; environmental history; digital humanities; landscape aesthetics; history of tourism, clothing and equipment; sports science and medicine; feminism; and computer sciences. Conversations will include creative practitioners in landscape representation; archivists and curators; and stakeholders across heritage, conservation, sanitation, environmentalism, engineering, physiotherapy, tourism and outdoor industries, clothing and kit design. WITH has four project partners: conservation charity John Muir Trust, women's trail-running company Girls on Hills, pelvic health campaigners Pelvic Roar, and University of Manchester's English Department (Dr Joanna Taylor, scholar of literary geography and digital humanities). Collaborators include the Outdoor Industries Association, EVB Sport, and National Trust. After a public launch at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts' Nature-Writing Festival (c. 200 people), the network will include three one-day workshops (c. 40 people), each themed around one of the network's three focal categories. A residential field weekend for underprivileged women (c. 10 people) will include practical, informative and creative sessions influenced by workshop discussions. A two-day conference (c. 120 people) will report on key findings from the workshops and weekend, and build on these via presentations from invited speakers and participants from an open call. The network's explorations will be disseminated via a journal special issue; Wordsworth Trust exhibition; website, blog and social media; and policy document identifying barriers and recommending deliverable improvements, whose impact will be measured during interventions implemented by Girls on Hills, and the National Trust. Through these approaches, WITH will develop an inter-disciplinary, cross-sector methodology applicable to future research on diversity among land-users' experiences and representations.