Writing

My writing about the local landscape – its history, wildlife, people and seasonal changes – is the foundation of my freelance practice, which is made up of guided walks, arts collaborations and environmental education. Writing is how I reflect on and explore the narratives, meanings and values embodied in rural places. On this website, you can find over 120 published pieces, mostly written as extended series and projects.

• On the Green Hill: A collection of shorter, more reflective pieces on where the landscape is in its story.

• A Wide Singing Sky: Twelve monthly entries comprising a journal of our explorations of the local landscape in 2024.

• The Lay of the Land: Throughout 2023, I published a weekly journal of the landscape. Amounting to 55,000 words together with 1,800 photographs, it was a culmination and distillation of 15 years of exploring and learning about my 60-square-mile patch of the Pennines.

• Field Studies: Between November 2021 and November 2022, I published 12 editions in this series, each comprising collections of shorter pieces, including reviews of landscape-related radio, podcasts, books, TV and film.

• A Circling Year: Between April 2020 and March 2021, I kept a journal of the explorations into the landscape that my son and I made in that strangest of years.

• 24,000 Words: In 2015–16 I wrote a monthly thousand-word textual portrait, each of a single place, joining them with my friend Michael Rush’s contributions from his own landscape on the edge of the Peak District.

• Essays: I have also written many stand-alone pieces on walking with my young son, and essays ranging across subjects such as the philosophy of landscape, the stories embodied in rural places, the history of farming in the Calder Valley, the narrative approach to conservation, the decline of the ash tree, pastoral realism in the book and film of Akenfield, and my personal connections to the landscape of JA Baker’s masterpiece The Peregrine.

• Other Publications: I have contributed pieces to the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England’s Ways of Seeing magazine, the Slow the Flow blog, and to the National Trust and Land Lines’ The Writes of Spring nature diary in 2019 and 2020. I have attended writing workshops with Nicola Chester and Amanda Tuke, and have a piece featured in Amanda’s anthology of ‘Thumbnail Nature‘ writing.

• Academic Publications: I spent 11 years researching, writing and teaching in the Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester, first as a PhD student and then for seven years as a postdoctoral fellow. I oriented all my research and teaching around questions concerning the human relationship with the natural environment, and published widely in journals such as Environmental Values, Environmental Ethics and the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, and in edited collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (published by Oxford University Press) and Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy (published by Routledge).

My aim in my writing is to promote understanding and appreciation of the Pennine landscapes I love. It is my strong belief that the fact these are working landscapes maintained by farming is poorly represented in typical writing about nature and landscape. In trying to positively portray the work that farmers do to maintain the places we enjoy, my writing may describe the work that farmers are carrying out on their land, and while I try to be sensitive about not invading privacy when including such details, if you do have concerns about any of my work, please contact me.