Women In The Hills, c. 1800 to Present

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.

The Women in the Hills (WITH) network will engage members of non-HEI groups and the public in discussions about how women constitute a community of land users with distinct needs, values, interpretations and representations regarding landscape. As the Pathways to Impact document describes, WITH's strategy focuses on achieving impacts on six identified key groups (detailed below), to whom women's recreational upland use is directly relevant. WITH will do so by encouraging stakeholders, collaborators and participants to develop new insights and practices, especially when those practices confront how women's experiences of land use are shaped by the three focal categories of (a) female bodies, (b) women's social circumstances, and (c) decision-making about landscape. Our overarching intention is to increase the quality and quantity of women's participation in upland recreation, and to target specific groups of women for detailed engagement and measurement.

WITH's advisory group has been selected with the intention that decisions made by the group, and the various networks afforded, will be used to deliver wide-ranging impact. Members of the advisory group include:
- Emma Brockwell, co-director of Pelvic Roar pelvic health campaigning group, which has extensive networks and expertise in women's health and medicine;
- Keri Wallace, co-director of Girls on Hills trail-running company, with networks and expertise in sports science, kit design, and tourism;
- Kevin Lelland, Head of Development and Communications at John Muir Trust, with networks in conservation, environmentalism, tourism and leisure;
- Zakiya McKenzie, Forestry Commission writer-in-residence, with contacts in arts administration (Bristol Festival of Ideas) and media (she presents on Bristol's Ujima radio), and expertise in environmentalism, ecology and West Indian nature-writing;
- Harvey Wilkinson, curator at National Trust Lake District, with networks across heritage, conservation, tourism and museum sectors.
Key speakers at the network's meetings will be invited, and a proportion of participants will be located through an open call to bring new cross-sector participants into the network, providing further channels through which WITH can achieve impact on research and policy. This open call will be disseminated via the extensive networks of project partners and collaborators, and land-use policy-makers will be targeted via Mary-Ann Stephenson, Women's Budget Group director.

WITH aims to impact on the following six key groups, to whom women's distinct experiences and representations of recreational use of UK upland territories has extensive and direct relevance:
(1) conservation, tourism, environmentalism, sport and leisure groups seeking to improve diversity of access to land, and to improve female participation;
(2) those responsible for designing and managing material and social structures through which women's land use is mediated (including clothing and medical aid designers; authors of public health policy; and charities instigating therapeutic access to rural landscapes for disadvantaged women);
(3) female land-users themselves, whose specific needs and requirements are often not being met during walking, running and climbing activities in UK uplands, and whose representations of their experiences of land-use have historically been marginalised;
(4) organisers of nature- and landscape-writing prizes and festivals, seeking to increase public familiarity with women's representations of their land use, and readers and attendees engaging with such works;
(5) curators, archivists and the public audience of exhibitions, seeking to disseminate and consume knowledge about women's historical and contemporary recreational use of UK uplands;
(6) data analysts and policy writers concerned with the 'gender data gap', lack of sex-disaggregated data representing the differences between men and women's experiences, needs and requirements.