Walking the Menopause
Walking the Menopause developed from my own experience of surgical menopause and has grown into a series of site-specific menopause-walks created across the landscapes of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Through walking, conversation and creative mapping, the project explores how menopause is experienced, remembered and understood through landscape.
The project has developed in two interconnected strands. The first emerged through my own walking practice, creating walks that enabled me to reflect on and make sense of the physical and emotional experiences of menopause. Walking became a creative methodology through which I explored the changing relationship between body, landscape and movement.
The second strand developed through collaboration with others. Some menopause walks have been created and led by me for public events, including World Menopause Day and International Women's Day. Others have been developed with individuals or groups and are shaped around their particular experiences of the peri/menopause transition, including menopause following chemotherapy or endometriosis, Premature Ovarian Insufficiency (POI), surgical menopause and menopause experienced following gender transition.
Whatever their relationship to menopause, participants are invited to explore landscape through the lens of their own lived experience. As part of the walk-making process, or following a pre-designed walk, they create a menopause-map using words, drawings, colour, symbols and line. These maps may represent real or imagined places, nearby or distant landscapes, and become creative records of personal journeys through menopause.
Workshops and Talks
Walking the Menopause has also informed a programme of workshops and talks for universities, arts organisations and community groups, exploring menopause through walking, creative mapping and conversation. This aspect of the work continues to develop and will be expanded elsewhere on the website.
Walking the Menopause: Eskdale and Little Langdale
"Standing on the viewing platform, I realised I could no longer trust my balance."
The first two Walking the Menopause walks I created were in the Lake District, Cumbria. They emerged directly from my experience of radical hysterectomy and the sudden 'cliff-edge' of surgical menopause that followed.
The first walk, in Eskdale, follows a route of meandering paths that crosses and swims through an ice-clear river before climbing a steep-sided valley through woodland of standing and felled trees. It culminates on a vertiginous viewing platform where the expansive view across the valley and distant fells provoked sensations uncannily similar to the hot flushes and dizziness I was experiencing during menopause. The landscape became a way of recognising and negotiating bodily change.
The second walk takes place amongst the dramatic slate quarries of Little Langdale. Moving through caverns, tunnels and quarry workings, I found myself thinking about extraction, absence and the traces left behind. The removal of slate from the mountain resonated with the removal of my uterus, cervix and fallopian tubes, prompting me to consider how both processes remove matter, create human-made voids and generate spoil. Rather than illustrating my experience, the landscape provided a way of thinking through it.
Walking the Menopause: Eskdale and Little Langdale
"Standing on the viewing platform, I realised I could no longer trust my balance."
The first two Walking the Menopause walks I created were in the Lake District, Cumbria. They emerged directly from my experience of radical hysterectomy and the sudden 'cliff-edge' of surgical menopause that followed.
The first walk, in Eskdale, follows a route of meandering paths that crosses and swims through an ice-clear river before climbing a steep-sided valley through woodland of standing and felled trees. It culminates on a vertiginous viewing platform where the expansive view across the valley and distant fells provoked sensations uncannily similar to the hot flushes and dizziness I was experiencing during menopause. The landscape became a way of recognising and negotiating bodily change.
The second walk takes place amongst the dramatic slate quarries of Little Langdale. Moving through caverns, tunnels and quarry workings, I found myself thinking about extraction, absence and the traces left behind. The removal of slate from the mountain resonated with the removal of my uterus, cervix and fallopian tubes, prompting me to consider how both processes remove matter, create human-made voids and generate spoil. Rather than illustrating my experience, the landscape provided a way of thinking through it.
Scout Scar
Walking the Menopause: Scout Scar
Walking the Menopause: Scout Scar was first created for International Women's Day 2023 and brought together women+ taking part in a day of menopause events and workshops.
Developed through a series of exploratory site visits and pilot walks with friends, the walk follows a route across Scout Scar's limestone escarpment, moving along geological fault lines, edges and scars; across weather-worn limestone pavement; past wind-blasted trees, rare juniper bushes and glacial erratics. Along the way, participants are invited to slow down, notice the landscape and consider how environmental forces—wind, rain, ice, sound and time—might resonate with their own experiences of peri/menopause.
At a series of carefully chosen stations, observations about the landscape are woven together with reflections on menopause, creating opportunities for conversation rather than prescribing particular meanings. Participants are encouraged to make their own connections between body and place. For some, an out-of-place erratic reflected the unpredictability of menopause; for others, holly leaves prompted conversations about anger, while the clatter of loose limestone underfoot evoked thoughts of drying bones and the loss of oestrogen.
The walk concludes at a sheltered viewing station overlooking the Lakeland Fells, the Yorkshire Dales and Morecambe Bay. Here, participants are invited to choose a distant landscape and think of someone they would like to share it with—someone experiencing menopause, or someone with whom they would like to share something of that experience. They then begin a menopause-map, drawing the walk as they experienced it and tracing the connections that emerged between landscape, memory and menopause.
Walking the Menopause: Scout Scar
Walking the Menopause: Scout Scar was first created for International Women's Day 2023 and brought together women+ taking part in a day of menopause events and workshops.
Developed through a series of exploratory site visits and pilot walks with friends, the walk follows a route across Scout Scar's limestone escarpment, moving along geological fault lines, edges and scars; across weather-worn limestone pavement; past wind-blasted trees, rare juniper bushes and glacial erratics. Along the way, participants are invited to slow down, notice the landscape and consider how environmental forces—wind, rain, ice, sound and time—might resonate with their own experiences of peri/menopause.
At a series of carefully chosen stations, observations about the landscape are woven together with reflections on menopause, creating opportunities for conversation rather than prescribing particular meanings. Participants are encouraged to make their own connections between body and place. For some, an out-of-place erratic reflected the unpredictability of menopause; for others, holly leaves prompted conversations about anger, while the clatter of loose limestone underfoot evoked thoughts of drying bones and the loss of oestrogen.
The walk concludes at a sheltered viewing station overlooking the Lakeland Fells, the Yorkshire Dales and Morecambe Bay. Here, participants are invited to choose a distant landscape and think of someone they would like to share it with—someone experiencing menopause, or someone with whom they would like to share something of that experience. They then begin a menopause-map, drawing the walk as they experienced it and tracing the connections that emerged between landscape, memory and menopause.
Walking the Menopause: Holme Park Fell
Long Churn
Walking and talking with Louise has enabled me to start naming and shaping the experience of menopause in a creative and healing way. I've had time to reflect upon and see with more clarity and with different perspectives what my bodymind has been experiencing through the last eight years. Having written that sentence I now want to lie down on the earth and roar with laughter. There has been so little clarity throughout this time and so many moments where perspective went walk about. I often feel as if these have been the lost years and yet and yet.
With Lou's support and an invitation to lean into the land; the landscape has come to support me and enable me to find new ways to move forward. Moreover there has been a strong emphasis on discovering what is still possible and what new stories/new creations can be grown. We have talked and drawn and made marks. We have swam in rivers and climbed into caves and all the while talked about our bodies and the changes we are undergoing and paid attention to what helps.
Walking the Menopause participant, 5.1.23.
Walking and talking with Louise has enabled me to start naming and shaping the experience of menopause in a creative and healing way. I've had time to reflect upon and see with more clarity and with different perspectives what my bodymind has been experiencing through the last eight years. Having written that sentence I now want to lie down on the earth and roar with laughter. There has been so little clarity throughout this time and so many moments where perspective went walk about. I often feel as if these have been the lost years and yet and yet.
With Lou's support and an invitation to lean into the land; the landscape has come to support me and enable me to find new ways to move forward. Moreover there has been a strong emphasis on discovering what is still possible and what new stories/new creations can be grown. We have talked and drawn and made marks. We have swam in rivers and climbed into caves and all the while talked about our bodies and the changes we are undergoing and paid attention to what helps.
Walking the Menopause participant, 5.1.23.
Menopause Mapping: Creative workshops, talks and collaborative practice
Menopause-mapping is a creative process I have developed to help individuals and groups explore menopause through drawing, conversation and landscape. It offers an alternative way of reflecting on experiences that can be difficult to articulate in words alone.
Participants begin by creating a map using words, line, colour, symbols and imagery. These maps are not intended to be accurate representations of place or demonstrations of artistic skill. Instead, they become exploratory drawings that bring together memories, sensations, emotions and lived experience. Landscapes may be real, imagined or somewhere between the two.
As the mapping develops, recurring themes, images and ideas often begin to emerge. These can suggest particular types of landscape that resonate with an individual's experience, leading to further site visits, walking, creative enquiry or conversation. For some participants, the mapping process becomes the starting point for new journeys, walks and creative projects that continue beyond the workshop itself. For others, the map itself becomes the work: a visual record of a personal journey through menopause.
Developed through my own creative practice, menopause mapping has informed both individual and collective Walking the Menopause projects. It has also been adapted into creative workshops and talks for universities, arts organisations, museums, healthcare settings and community groups, creating supportive spaces in which menopause can be explored through landscape, conversation and making.
Workshops and talks
If you are interested in commissioning a menopause mapping workshop, walk or talk for your organisation, conference, community group or event, I would be pleased to hear from you. Workshops can be adapted to different audiences and contexts and may include drawing, mapping, walking and creative discussion.
Menopause-mapping is a creative process I have developed to help individuals and groups explore menopause through drawing, conversation and landscape. It offers an alternative way of reflecting on experiences that can be difficult to articulate in words alone.
Participants begin by creating a map using words, line, colour, symbols and imagery. These maps are not intended to be accurate representations of place or demonstrations of artistic skill. Instead, they become exploratory drawings that bring together memories, sensations, emotions and lived experience. Landscapes may be real, imagined or somewhere between the two.
As the mapping develops, recurring themes, images and ideas often begin to emerge. These can suggest particular types of landscape that resonate with an individual's experience, leading to further site visits, walking, creative enquiry or conversation. For some participants, the mapping process becomes the starting point for new journeys, walks and creative projects that continue beyond the workshop itself. For others, the map itself becomes the work: a visual record of a personal journey through menopause.
Developed through my own creative practice, menopause mapping has informed both individual and collective Walking the Menopause projects. It has also been adapted into creative workshops and talks for universities, arts organisations, museums, healthcare settings and community groups, creating supportive spaces in which menopause can be explored through landscape, conversation and making.
Workshops and talks
If you are interested in commissioning a menopause mapping workshop, walk or talk for your organisation, conference, community group or event, I would be pleased to hear from you. Workshops can be adapted to different audiences and contexts and may include drawing, mapping, walking and creative discussion.
