As female trailblazers go, pioneering explorer Isabella Bird had given herself a mountain to climb.
Scoffed at by both men and women in the Victorian era, the Yorkshire lass, plagued by ill health since childhood, set off on her own in 1871 on an expedition to see the world in a series of adventures on horseback.
She cantered across Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains in the lawless Wild West, Japan, from Baghdad to Tehran, and finally through Tibet after her doctor had said an open-air life would help her mental health, headaches, insomnia and a spinal problem.
