Women’s Ways
A most unusual walking guide to the Sheffield area will hit the shops in the next few weeks. It has been produced by seven local women who decided to share the places and walks they love with others.
Listen out in the autumn to Claire Balding's Ramblings programme on BBC Radio 4, as one of thier walks will be featured.
The book is called "Women's Ways" and is edited by Sue Beardon (pictured), whose last walking guide "Bus Walk Bus" was a sell-out success. The book is published and distributed by Mayfield Books and Gifts, and this is one of their first forays into publishing their own guides.
Sue has contributed three walks to the book, demonstrating her love of wild places not usually accessed by many people.
Other contributors include Debby Pickvance, a psychotherapist and grandmother of two, who celebrates both birth and death in her choice of walks. One recalls the story of a cow having a difficult birth in the Derbyshire Dales and another celebrates the memory of a dear friend who loved to walk on Carr Head rocks.
Heather Hunt is a well known local climate change activist who has been instrumental in setting up a Community Supported Agriculture project in the Moss Valley, and one of her walks goes past it.
Sally Goldsmith is an award winning poet, song writer and broadcaster who contributes the walk she has led for the Off the Shelf literary festival, showing the many radical historical associations of the Totley area.
Jill Angood contributes a walk near Dunford Bridge that passes Lifespan Community, where she lived and brought up her daughter, and which still survives as an eco-housing co-operative.
Cathy Hill contributes three legs of a walk she designed herself for her 50th birthday. With maps and string and a pair of compasses she worked out a one hundred mile circumference walk around Sheffield, and the book includes the sections from Lodge Moor round to Elsecar.
Finally, Jenny Patient, another climate activist who works at Heeley City Farm, designed an adventurous three day Don Watershed walk from Denby Dale to Ladybower, which she undertook last summer, camping out wild on the way. The book shows how this can be followed as three separate day walks or as Jenny herself did it.
With lovely photographs taken by the contributors, drawings by local architect and artist Jenny Fortune, as well as little biographical sketches of the women involved, and some tips for novice navigators, the book is ideal as a present for all who love walking in and around Sheffield.
The book will be available in all walking and book shops in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, or you can purchase one direct from the contributors. All proceeds we raise by direct sales will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Palestine Women's Scholarship Fund - favourite charities of Jos Kingston, one of our friends to whom the book is dedicated following her sad death from cancer.
To contact Sue email sue.beardon@googlemail.com
Sue Beardon
0114 258 0944
07789893547
Trade enquiries sales@mayfield-books.co.uk
Mayfield Books & Gifts
Dore House Industrial Estate
9 Orgreave Close
SHEFFIELD S13 9NP
0800 834920