As far as walls go, they don’t get much more epic than Hadrian’s. Stretching 73 miles across the north of England from Bowness-on-Solway to Wallsend, it connects two coasts, 14 forts and huge sweeps of scenic countryside. It’s still inspiring a sense of awe almost 2,000 years after its creation, as Amira, Ayisha and Najma – three of the organisers behind Muslim hiking and adventure group the Wanderlust Women – discovered. Venturing from the rocky crags of Steel Rigg to Houseteads, Britain’s best-preserved Roman fort, via the Sycamore Gap memorial, they discovered some of the wall’s most spectacular sites. “You can feel the history here, just being able to see all the ruins and everything. The landscape is so vast and so beautiful. It’s literally breathtaking,” Ayisha says.
Experiences of this kind are something that Amira, the Wanderlust Women’s founder, is determined to help her community access. Inheriting a love of the outdoors from her mother, she wanted other Muslim women to feel as at home in nature as she does. So she created the Wanderlust Women in 2020 and, in the years since, has taken scores of women on trips across the UK and abroad, bonding through faith and challenging the stereotype of the “typical” hiker. As Amira says: “We walk proudly outside because it is our place to be, it’s everyone’s place to be.”
