Our Wild Pennines – It’s Finally Happening!

Our Wild Pennines is going ahead and will be available to buy soon.

After last year’s abortive attempt to publish Our Wild Pennines, I eventually decided to take matters into my own hands and fund the project myself.

In July 2025, I launched a Kickstarter campaign with the ambitious aim of raising enough money to print 1,000 copies of the book, while hopefully avoiding making a loss in the process.

I quickly discovered that Kickstarter can be a challenging platform for both the creator and the potential buyer. I received plenty of feedback from people who wanted to support the project but struggled with the process of making a pledge. In the end, several people simply told me what they wanted to pledge and my wife entered the pledges on Kickstarter for them.

Many people were unfamiliar with crowdfunding, while others had never heard of Kickstarter and were understandably reluctant to create an account and share personal details simply to buy a book. Put simply, they didn’t trust it. They just wanted to buy the book!

In the end, 87 people actively backed the project, around a third of them complete strangers. Some ordered several books, while others chose rewards such as signed photographic prints. A few simply wanted to support the project. I was incredibly grateful to every one of them.

Unfortunately, the campaign fell well short of its financial target.

I was advised to forget about a printed book and produce an eBook instead. But that rather misses the point. Photographers like to see their work printed. I certainly do. There is something very special about holding a beautifully printed photograph in your hands that simply cannot be replicated on a screen.

So, after licking my wounds and wondering whether Our Wild Pennines would ever see the light of day, I began to think seriously about what to do next.

Then came one of those wonderfully unlikely coincidences.

During the autumn of 2025, Storm Amy was sweeping across the UK. I was due to launch a photography exhibition at a local gallery that evening when, in the middle of the afternoon, I received a call from a close friend asking whether I could rescue a friend of his who was walking the Dales Way and was heading towards a B&B close to our house in Sedbergh.

I agreed and drove to the Heritage Centre in Dent, where I met a very wet and fed-up Jacquetta Megarry.

Jacquetta writes and publishes walking guides and was at the time revising her guide to the Dales Way (rucsacs.com). During our conversation I told her about Our Wild Pennines and my problems getting it published.

That chance meeting turned out to be something of a turning point.

Jacquetta kindly offered to mentor me through the process of getting the book published. Following several Zoom conversations and phone calls — and some fairly brutal but extremely useful feedback — I made a number of amendments to the book and eventually decided that the best way forward was to self-publish.

With the help of Jacquetta and her very helpful printers at Akcent Media, Our Wild Pennines finally went to print.

And this time, it is really happening.

The first print run is 500 copies, and I expect the books to be back with me within the next month or so. After all the false starts, setbacks and unexpected twists and turns, I am hugely excited to finally be able to put the finished book into people's hands.

Our Wild Pennines is, at its heart, a photographic journey through the wildlife and conservation stories of the Pennines — a landscape I have spent years exploring with a camera.

It has taken a long time to get here. But sometimes the longest journeys are the most rewarding.

More news soon on the launch date and how you can get your copy.