Written by Rebecca Ridgway and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1992 (OUT OF PRINT)

At the age of fifteen, Rebecca Ridgway wanted to do something amazing. The chance came nine years later, in January 1992, when she was the first woman to paddle a kayak round Cape Horn. This adventurous foray into the world’s most notorious seas forms the climax of a book, which does not exactly hold back on the amazing before the final chapters.

As daughter of Atlantic rower and round world yachtsman John Ridgway, her upbringing has hardly been conventional and certainly not without challenges. Rebecca was an only child, reared on the gale-swept Ardmore peninsula fifteen miles south of Cape Wrath, Scotland’s top left-hand corner. Access is by sea, as there is still no road to Ardmore. For most of her childhood there was no electricity either. Milk is powdered, the Rayburn cooker peat-fired. She tells of growing up in this beautiful and remote former crofting community which in summer becomes busy with the activities of her parents’ internationally famous Adventure School.

She tells too, of winter expeditions the family were able to take at the end of the Adventure School season. Especially those to the dangerous headwaters of the Amazon, on which the Ridgways braved Shining Path terrorist country, to discover and bring back to Scotland, the small Peruvian-Indian daughter of a murdered friend.

Elizabeth’s story has already been told in John Ridgway’s Road to Elizabeth, but Rebecca here describes for the first time, her own feelings for her new sister. And also another hazardous trek across the snow-covered mountains and through jungle, to bring news of Elizabeth’s well-being to some of her family, in a world ravaged by years of Sendero guerrilla warfare and now seldom penetrated by foreign travellers.

The final chapters, which tell of the journey to and circumnavigation of Cape Horn, are quintessential armchair travel writing, full of precisely observed detail of a stunningly beautiful and remote world and alive with the exuberance of achieving something amazing.

Today, Rebecca Ridgway lives in the Blue House, with her husband Will Burchnall and their two children, Molly and Hugh, on their own croft, on the other side of the Ardmore wood from her parents. She and Will run their own Cape Adventure School, across the loch at Skerricha. See Cape Adventure

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