Kate Barron shares her epic journey of motherhood on the move

“It was massive for Chris too. He never expected to meet anybody. He’d been with Jet (his dog) for so long in the remote wilderness of Scotland, so to have someone join him was a huge thing, but we very quickly found a rhythm. I came into it in November 2020, heading straight into a Scottish winter on the east coast, where winds and temperatures can be even more brutal than they are elsewhere. I had the perspective that this is your journey, and I am here to learn from you, so Chris still had a sense of ownership over it. And he finally had someone to share all these amazing experiences with. He had someone he could be playful with – someone he could skim stones with. Someone to look at the stars and see amazing sunsets with.”

I ask Kate whether she and Chris have a similar approach to life. “Yes, very much,” she says, “and I think that’s why it works. We take each day as it comes. We don’t plan too much in advance. We don’t sweat the small stuff. We improvise. We’re both very quick to adapt to whatever situation we’re in, and for the walk, that works. And our outlook has moved in the same direction while we’ve been on the walk in terms of what we want our future to look like. A future of travel and exciting adventures and living outdoors in quite an extreme way. We want to feel bonded to the natural world. And just faith that we can pursue a life of doing what we want to do.”

I wonder whether what is important to Kate has changed since the walk. “Before, I lived in London. My life couldn’t be more different now to what it was like then. It was chaotic: work, eat, sleep, repeat. Cafes, bars, restaurants, galleries. Zooming around constantly. Always knackered. There are elements that I enjoyed – the cultural stimulation of a place like London – but I’d never go back to live there. More than I expected, I’ve found myself coming round to a future in which we live more sustainably, more simply, with far less stuff.”

Kate talks about her connection to the natural world. “My connection with nature has amplified a hundred-fold since being on this journey. When you’re living out in it, immersed in it, you’re learning how to harness it every day to meet your survival needs. You move through the seasons and you become very much a part of nature. That connection is paramount. That really came to a head for me when I was thinking about having Magnus. I want him to have this strong bond with the natural world. Children being immersed in nature is important for so many reasons and I want him to feel connected to and really care about the planet he lives on.”

I ask Kate whether her pregnancy brought new challenges to the walk. “There was never any doubt in my mind that I would continue,” she says. “I knew walking and being outside would be great for me physically and mentally.” However, accessing maternity care was a challenge to start with. “When I first found out I was pregnant, I was told that no one would treat me unless I stayed within a 30-mile radius of a specific hospital.” Kate registered at a medical centre in Worcestershire, where her mum lives, and had to travel across the country for appointments, which, without a vehicle, made things very difficult. It wasn’t until a scan at five months that she was told she’d been given bad advice. “Everyone is entitled to maternity care. From then on, I would just ring whatever hospital I would be near in advance and make appointments.”

Kate had made plans for a home birth near Dorchester, staying in a yurt on the coast. “The home birth team told me I had to stop by 37 weeks because they needed to see me and I could have given birth at any time, so that’s when we stopped walking and we moved ahead to Dorset to get set up to have a baby. It was an emergency c-section in the end, after a long, difficult labour, so we had to wait for me to be ready physically before we set off again. We lived in a yurt in a woodland near the coast for the first two months of Magnus’s life, and when he was 3 months old, we went back to where we’d left off, in Kent.

Since becoming a mum, the walk has taken on even greater significance for Kate. “What bigger meaning is there in life than bringing a child into this world and becoming a parent? And to have done that on this walk has meant that it has become a hugely meaningful experience for me. Having walked through my pregnancy, given birth and then carried my son for his first year of life on the walk is just massive. And being able to bond with him in the way that I have in this first year, I’m lucky and grateful that the walk has allowed that. I’m with him all the time, outside, and we get this amazing sense of awe and wonder and discovery and adventure, every single day together.”