When I was growing up I wanted to be a writer and an explorer. Somehow, to my surprise, I have achieved both, after a fashion. As a boy my passions were reading and exploring the countryside around my home on the Lancashire coast. I climbed trees, fell in ditches, got lost in thickets, built dens, and imagined myself as the children in the books I read, especially those in the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons stories and the Richmal Crompton Just William stories.
I also read true stories of exploration and discovery from classics like John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest to the Zoo Quest tales of a young David Attenborough. Imagining myself on Everest or in the jungles of South America was beyond me at ten years old but I could imagine being in Ransome’s Lake District while the imaginary countryside of William Brown was very similar to the real one all around me.
I never lost my dreams, though in my teens and early twenties they were pushed aside a little by the pressing concerns of adolescence, and I never stopped wandering in the countryside or scribbling in notebooks. I never thought either of them could be a way of making a living though and no-one ever suggested they could. My life as a long distance walker and outdoor writer came about gradually, unplanned and with many fortuitous twists and turns.
I wrote a few articles about long walks I’d done in the late 1970s and discovered that magazine editors quite liked them so I wrote some more and then expanded them to cover my thoughts and feelings about the outdoors and outdoor activities. I’m still writing many decades later and a selection of these essays make up this book, revised and with some changes to bring them up to date.
My previous books have been stories of long walks such as Rattlesnakes and Bald Eagles, ‘how-to’ books like The Backpacker’s Handbook and guidebooks such as World Mountain Ranges: Scotland. The essays in this book cover a greater range of topics and many of the ideas that appear in my earlier books are expanded and considered in more depth.
My interests are in wild land and the outdoors in all its aspects so you’ll find my thoughts on rewilding, forests, mountains, wilderness writers, outdoor gear and more, plus accounts of ski tours in places like Spitsbergen and Greenland, and trekking in the Himalayas as well as walks long and short.
My passion for wild places and for communicating my joy in them hasn’t dimmed over the years. If anything it has grown. Along with it has come a growing desire to help defend these places and work for their conservation and restoration. Out There tells the story of my outdoor life and shows the importance of wild places to me. My hope is that it will enhance your own experience of ‘out there’ or, if you haven’t been yet, inspire you to think and feel about it with something of my own affection, enthusiasm and concern.