SHE was a woman ahead of her time and travelled the world before finally settling down in Dorset.

Today there is little trace of the explorations and adven tures of Miss Gertrude Benham but her staunch independence helped inspire a new book celebrating the determined women travellers of old who defied the expectations and prejudices of their times to strike out across the world.

Off the Beaten Track, by Dea Birkett, has been written to accompany an exhibition on show at the National Portrait Gallery in London until October 31.

The author uses the story of Miss Benham in her introduction, quoting a letter from a colonial soldier who wrote home to his mother from an army station in north Nigeria in 1916.

"I have just met Miss Benham - the experienced lady traveller - she really is a rather wonderful person," he wrote.

"She became very friendly last night here and told me the reasons which led her to take to wandering about the world.

"To put it boldly, it was sheer loneliness - she said she had no relations who took the slightest interest in her."

Having a small income of her own "she started wandering, got bitten with it and for eight years has been wandering all over the world."

During her travelling years Miss Benham climbed in New Zealand and Japan, visited Australia and India, climbed in the Alps 17 times, crossed central Africa four times and visited the Himalayas on several occasions.

And every time she returned to England she brought with her suitcases full of artefacts and curios that she bequeathed to a museum near Lyme Regis where she eventually settled.

Dea Birkett's book takes a look at numerous women travellers from Freya Stark to Isabella Bird and from Constance Gordon Cumming to aviator Amy Johnston.

Its foreword by Jan Morris, who has experienced travelling as a man and a woman having undergone a sex change 32 years ago, pays homage to the extraordinary women, from scholars and botanists to big game hunters and missionaries, who challenged convention by travelling.

"What they all had in common was their gender and their guts," she writes. Women like Gertrude Benham who made such an impression on Selwyn Grier, that colonial officer who met her at that isolated army station in Nigeria in 1916.

In his letter to his mother he wrote:

"This morning she trudged out of the station with one servant and seven carriers to go to Yorla - some 200-odd miles - from there she goes into German Territory, then the Congo, then up into Nyasaland.

"It sounds perfectly mad," he said.

Off the Beaten Track by Dea Birkett, National Portrait Gallery £18.99.