Experiences of Eton — and the success it rewards

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was racially abused by another passenger. Besides using several words too offensive to quote, the man spat that Sethi should go back to where she came from. And so she did. Sethi comes from Manchester. Her first reaction to the experience was to speak out, to alert a member of staff and to ensure her abuser faced justice; her second was to start planning a trek across northern England, the landscape that was hers and where she belonged.

Following old existing tracks and forging new ones of her own, she travelled to Malham Cove and Hull Pot and Whin Sill, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, calling along the way at places with brilliantly on-the-nose names such as Hope and The Angel and Settle. At one point, a foot injury prompts an enforced pause, which Sethi spends in Manchester, drawing inspiration from the Pankhursts.