The Long Path to Motherhood

In a painful year of personal and national sadness, can walking bring about healing? The Long Path to Motherhood is a nature memoir that explores how engaging with nature through walking can help us recover from difficult times in our lives.

The book centres on the author’s need to confront her grief at failing to have children and her quest to shape a new life beyond the one she imagined. Walking the Great Stones Way from Avebury to Stonehenge and encountering ancient stones, eerie burial chambers and sacred places, the book asks how placing ourselves in nature can help us to move from loss to acceptance and reveal new ways of living that are rich and valuable. Throughout the walk, these questions are shadowed by the poetry of Edward Thomas: a poet whose struggles with mental health were eased by nature and walking.

Through the experience of being in these special landscapes, the book aims to show how engaging with the beauty, mystery and otherness of nature can generate healing. It is ultimately a hopeful book that acknowledges that whilst there are dark points in everyone’s lives, nature has the potential to guide us towards light, recovery and happiness.