{"id":13067,"date":"2025-07-21T13:45:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T13:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/13067\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:45:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T13:45:11","slug":"the-parallel-path-by-jenn-ashworth-review-a-soul-searching-walk-across-england-travel-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/13067\/","title":{"rendered":"The Parallel Path by Jenn Ashworth review \u2013 a soul-searching walk across England | Travel writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Jenn Ashworth set out on Alfred Wainwright\u2019s 192-mile coast-to-coast walk<\/a>, from St Bees in the west to Robin Hood\u2019s 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\u2019t get lost. She wasn\u2019t walking for charity or running away from a marriage or, like the fell runner who\u2019d done the route in 39 hours, trying to break any record. A\u00a0homebody \u201cinclined to slowness\u201d, she was a 40-year-old novelist<\/a>, professor and mother of two going off on her own for two-and-a-half weeks for reasons she couldn\u2019t quite articulate.<\/p>\n

Not that there weren\u2019t 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 (\u201ca\u00a0one-woman battle against entropy\u201d). She also knew that at every pub and guest house she\u2019d booked en route supportive letters would be waiting from her terminally ill but brilliantly animated friend Clive. Most importantly, although her walking wouldn\u2019t be solitary, since she couldn\u2019t avoid bumping into other (potentially annoying) hikers, she\u2019d be \u201cthe sole owner of my own skin again\u201d.<\/p>\n

As she flogs herself \u201conwards towards impressiveness\u201d, her journey is marked out plainly. The chapters detail the distance and destinations of each day\u2019s walk. They also convey how brittle, sour and grumpy she can be, and\u00a0how blistered and footsore she gets: she might be \u201coff on a jolly\u201d but there\u2019s a\u00a0price to pay, in pain and guilt. She doesn\u2019t go in for nature writing: when she evokes \u201cthe damp green air and the\u00a0heavy, alive smell of the still-wet branches and mulchy undergrowth\u201d, it\u2019s a plain-as-muck authentic response, not a \u201csoft\u201d poeticism. Maybe that\u2019s 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\u2019t Alfred Wainwright\u2019s, whose \u201cgruff complaining\u201d she engages with throughout \u2013 enjoyably and sometimes scathingly.<\/p>\n

The book conveys how brittle, sour and grumpy she can be, and\u00a0how blistered and footsore she gets<\/p>\n

He\u2019s 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\u2019s writers she carries with her\u00a0\u2013 Henry David Thoreau, William Hazlitt, Werner Herzog (who walked from Munich to Paris<\/a> to see his dying mentor) and Virginia Woolf \u2013 whose ideas inspire her own. (Had it come out sooner, David Nicholls\u2019s novel of last year covering the same route, You Are Here, might have featured too.)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s captivating about her book is all the thinking she does mid- or post-trek: on writing, friendship, welfare, illness, Charles Atlas<\/a>, climate change, protest marches, knitting, and why it is that in popular mythology \u201cwalking women\u201d are either models on a catwalk or sex workers. As she wanders, her mind wanders. Solvitur ambulando: she\u2019s not sure what exactly it is she\u2019s trying to solve by walking, but the book\u2019s as much an invigorating mental workout as it is a\u00a0hard physical trudge.<\/p>\n

Memories surface, too, from childhood and adolescence: of a girl called Alice she knew who died in a \u201chorrible accident\u201d when Ashworth was 10 and whose photo she hid in a\u00a0bottle; of her volunteering for the Samaritans as one of the women (Brendas,<\/a> they were called) who\u2019d listen on the phone to distressed or lonely callers, including men who\u2019d 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<\/a>, Ashworth devised a method that married narrative fragments with philosophising lyrical essays. Here the storyline is simpler \u2013 a\u00a0walk, start to finish \u2013 but the method is much the same.<\/p>\n

Towards the end comes the threat of failure. She loses her balance and falls \u2013 no injury is sustained, but the\u00a0dizziness feels ominous. Then a\u00a0heatwave arrives, making the scheduled completion of the walk impossible. The complications gather\u00a0to a major health crisis, closer to home than the one affecting Clive. Mercifully, there\u2019s an upbeat outcome, adding another layer to the motif of care. The walk that the author saw \u201cas a break from the labour of care turned out to be a path that led me deeper into understanding my own need for it\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot until we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves,\u201d Thoreau wrote. Ashworth didn\u2019t walk 192 miles in order to find herself. But she\u2019s newly conscious afterwards not of her stamina and sure-footedness but of her frailty, of how \u201cmy body is more fragmented and vulnerable than I wanted it to be\u201d. Despite her guise as an \u201carmoured little being stomping her way across the entire country\u201d, she\u2019s forced to embrace a new kind of gentleness. And rather than exulting in independence, she\u2019s back among friends and freshly available to \u201cthe traffic of love\u201d. Chastened but buoyant, she\u2019s stimulating to be with, her book the best kind of walking companion.<\/p>\n

The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North by Jenn Ashworth is published by Sceptre (\u00a320). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Jenn Ashworth set out on Alfred Wainwright\u2019s 192-mile coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees in the west to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-13067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}