I am delighted to announce that Sky Dance, my next novel will be published on the 5th of September by Vertebrate Publishing the Sheffield based company that specialises in outdoor books and has authors on its books like Doug Scott and Stephen Venables. Vertebrate are taking on all three of my books including The Last Hillwalker and Bothy Tales. Publication of both these books in paperback has been temporarily suspended while they transfer across to Vertebrate but you can still get both of these books on your e-reader and Bothy Tales is on special offer right now for just 99p.
Sky Dance is my first novel and it’s set in in the hills of the Highlands in same world of wild weather and even wilder bothy nights as my previous books. It follows the adventures of two mountain men who love the hills and hate to see what’s being done to them by rich landowners who destroy our wild life and exploit our mountains.
Angus and Rory, our two heroes, decide to risk everything and take on the establishment in a bid to save the hills they love. Sky Dance is filled with the same humour you’ll find in my previous books but it has a serious message about what’s happening in our hills.
This book follows my own growing understanding of the damage the combination of our outdated land ownership laws and the obsession with blood sports, like deer stalking and driven grouse shooting, does to our wild places. When I first wandered the hills I saw a wild landscape untouched by the hand of man now I see hills scarred by deforestation and over grazing whose wild life is slowly being destroyed.
Read more in my previous post Death and Power
Far from being refuges for nature our hills are monuments to the power of land owners and their obsession with death. It’s time that changed. The end is coming for the huge sporting estates of the Highlands, there is a growing awareness of the damage being done by estates and a desire to see things change.
The hill walking community is not blameless. Whilst we approach our wild places with lists in our hands of hills to be ticked we will never learn to treasure them and protect them as we should. The mountains are living breathing places that we should not exploit for sport. Think how great our hills could be if they were swathed in forests filled with lynx, wild cat and even wolves. Then we would have a landscape to be proud of where we could live alongside the creatures who share this planet.
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