It’s easy to conflate the content of the northern novel with some sort of communal voice of the north. But the novelists’ north is not the same as the north that people actually live in.

The subtitle here is something of a misnomer: as with Attenborough’s previous volume, Adventures Of A Young Naturalist, the emphasis in these travel journals from the 1950s and 60s is as much on varieties of human culture as on non-human natural history.

This is one of the first nature books of the Covid-19 pandemic and it will be surprising if it does not turn out to be one of the best.

A story first published in The Lonely Crowd.

We have a peregrine now. It makes me think again about place and scale.

Published by Fairlight Books on July 1, 2021, and available to pre-order now.

This story was written while I was the Northern Short Story Festival’s Writer in Residence at Middleton Park in Leeds.

Something is wrong in the Robert Macfarlane Extended Universe.