I returned home with a glow of satisfaction but also with a lot of exhaustion. I know that I was unliveable with for several days. Rowland expected me to return home and do all the jobs which had been neglected for five weeks in the way of housework and gardening. I just felt like doing nothing. It took a week before I could even contemplate another mountain. My feet were very sore. Most of this had developed in the last few days which had been exceptionally hard.
I felt a real sense of achievement and wondered how many other people had done a similar walk. I think what might have set me apart from the others was my age and gender yet neither of these factors had seemed particularly significant.
As far as my relatively advanced years were concerned then I suppose that I was not really old enough to notice their effect. At 57 I do not feel that I am slowing down and I am almost as agile as I have ever been. More important perhaps I still love scrambling and have not outgrown my youthful enthusiasm for seeking out an interesting route up a hill. Of course if one selected a random 57 year old then there is a high probability that they would be less able to endure the rigours of a long backpack than a random 20 year old. My continued unbroken practise of hill walking made all the difference and here is where age is positively an advantage, reflecting as it does years of experience in the mountains.
I have often pondered on the definition of that much mentioned entity 'the experienced hill walker'. Being a modest sort of person I was loth for a long time to claim this apparently elevated status but decided that on completion of the Munros such a boast would be justified. The important quality is more than just particular skills of navigation or progress through difficult terrain. On this journey I felt that the most valuable asset which I had gained from my years of experience was to feel happy in the hills whatever the conditions. More valuable than the ability to follow an accurate bearing is the confidence to recover the situation should one fail to do so.
As far as gender is concerned I am tempted to echo my comments on age and say that I was not really female enough for it to make any difference. This may sound daft but in a sense it was quite true because I do not share the concerns which would make a trip of this sort harder for a female than for a male. Many women feel uncomfortable if they cannot take a bath or shower every day and would be horrified at the thought of wearing the same shirt for two weeks and putting on the same dirty wet socks every morning. Well I certainly did not enjoy putting on wet socks but I accepted it philosophically as a necessary evil. As far as washing was concerned I had sufficient nights in the comfort of B&B establishments and hostels to keep happily hygenic and those spent camping without washing facilities were not a problem to me. Some women might have felt embarassed in the more civilised places by appearing in the evening in the crumpled spare clothes which had doubled up in the stuff sac as a pillow but since most of my meals were taken in pubs I found them quite acceptable.
All this talk about washing and respectability is however evading the real issue which concerns women walkers, the fear of men. I have walked and camped alone in the hills for nearly forty years with no problems or fear of harassment whatever. I have perhaps been both lucky and naive because until recently I had never even thought about the possibility of trouble. Now it is increasingly difficult to ignore the very real fear which seems to haunt so many females at the thought of walking anywhere alone. This fear is of course fed by the sensationalised reports in the media of those very few women who have been attacked. Magazines catering for walkers carry articles about this problem which, although usually stressing the safety of the open hill, still focus attention on it and add to the subtle suggestion of a hidden danger which can slowly eat away one's confidence. Just before setting out on my walk a woman writing to The Great Outdoors magazine expressed this uncomfortable feeling of fear preventing her from enjoying solo walking. I felt that I had to write a reply. Rowland said that I was tempting fate by writing such a letter just before my long solo walk but this issue is so important to me that it is one on which I could not remain silent. I am particularly upset by the suggestion that it might be irresponsible to walk alone. I know that some of my friends would never do so and were horrified when they heard of my plan.
I broke all the rules of course because 'never walk alone' is not just an edict aimed at females. I went over the hills, often in dreadful weather, with nobody having much idea of where I was nor when I would emerge at the next village. Had I broken a leg I might have lain in agony for days and perhaps died of exposure. I knew the risks, very slight ones, which I was taking and believe that I had every right to take them without incurring criticism. The modern attitude to risk taking is a strange one since some great risk takers are applauded, racing drivers or those who climb Himalayan peaks for example, while those who take certain small risks like walking alone on a British hill are branded irresponsible. Meanwhile we all continue to drive our cars around with no suggestion of unacceptable danger whatever.
Concerning the danger incurred simply by being female I must say two things. Firstly I had no problems whatsoever nor the least suggestion of any problem. Perhaps had I been an attractive seventeen year old walking in a mini skirt things might have been different. A middle aged woman in breeches with a large rucksack and smelly socks is not an object of desire to the normal male. Well meaning friends, who perhaps thought the whole venture foolish anyway, advised me not to go to pubs, but this would have caused considerable inconvenience, if not starvation, since in most places there was no other place to get a meal. Most of the other walkers who I met on the hills were men and we often stopped for a friendly chat. This never caused me the least apprehension but being aware of how some women feel nowadays I sometimes wondered afterwards whether everybody would have felt so comfortable. Secondly I have to say that should things get worse so that I did feel uncomfortable with the situation then I should do my utmost to overcome the apprehension because I think it most important that women should not allow their freedom to be eroded by a few maniacs, nor by the infectious fear spread by others, nor by the charge of irresponsibility.
Some people asked me the name of the path which I had walked. I felt that they would have been more impressed if I had said The Cambrian Way or Offa's Dyke. Of course this did not bother me because I knew that I had done something tougher than either but it did give me pause for thought.
Mankind's greatest achievement is surely language. This above all sets him apart from other animals. Yet man is also constrained by language so that what cannot be put into words is deemed to be of no importance. A route without a label is no route. More significantly an experience which cannot be described in words is no experience. We struggle to express the most important moments. So I have tried to describe the best moments of my walk, the campsite at Llyn Hywel and the Snowdon Horseshoe for example, and been hopelessly aware of the inadequacy of any words to convey their magic to anybody else. Perhaps there are experiences too profound for words which should be preserved only as unspoken memories.
Many years ago I read a book about a group of people who had done 'rock' climbs, quite illegally of course, on the walls of Cambridge colleges. The great prize was Kings College Chapel and I was very impressed by the description which the author gave of his feelings after doing this climb as he remained in a state of elation and satisfaction long after it was completed. More recently an author in the YHA magazine summed it up in a single word when he talked about the 'buzz' which he had felt after plucking up the courage to do a bungee jump. This afterglow of satisfaction is a marvellous reward for the completion of some substantial or demanding undertaking. Climbing Mont Blanc certainly gave me that sense of satisfaction but this walk perhaps even more so. One remains on a high for sometime and as life slowly rolls back to normal little ripples of delight can still come unawares as a sudden word or sight or smell revives memories of the experience and the achievement.

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