A Cumbrian first-time author has scooped a prestigious award for nature writing.
Lee Schofield has won the Richard Jefferies Award for best nature writing for his book Wild Fell: Fighting for nature on a Lake District hill farm – bagging £1,000 in prize money.
The book is a detailed account of Lee’s work as the RSPB’s site manager at Haweswater in the Lake District, where the nature conservation charity works in partnership with the landowner United Utilities.
Their overall aim is to discover how to rebalance farming and nature and to develop a way to look after our land that occupies the middle ground between hill farming and conservation.
Lee said: “As a first-time author, and as someone who never imagined I’d have a book published, winning the Richard Jefferies Award is genuinely beyond my wildest dreams.
“There really would be no story to tell at Haweswater if it weren’t for my wonderful RSPB colleagues past and present, and the inspiration and energy I’ve gained from the Lake District’s growing band of conservationists and nature-friendly farmers. This award is really for all of them.”
While it might sound like an almost impossible agenda, Lee does not duck the challenges he has faced in mediating between the interests of a variety of key stakeholders in a highly sensitive landscape.
Although Wild Fell engages with the political, social, economic, cultural and financial contexts that affect Haweswater, it has been dubbed an optimistic and uplifting record of projects that are advancing conservation, producing positive changes and enriching the biodiversity of the environment.
These initiatives include altering land usage, especially by scaling back the number of sheep, extensive new planting of trees and wildflowers, restoring a river to its natural course, soil improvement, and developing eco-tourism to benefit the local economy.
The book has also been called a convincing illustration of what can be achieved when a conservation organisation works with a water company and the local community to effect change.
Professor Barry Sloan, chair of the panel of judges, said: “Much of the appeal of Wild Fell stems from the fluency with which Lee Schofield conveys the intimate knowledge and deep feeling he has developed for the Haweswater landscape, his own personal commitment to enriching and developing it, and the unabashed delight he takes from each sign of progressive change.
“It is a highly personal story as well as a thoroughly documented account of a complex and ongoing conservation project, a combination which should earn it the wide readership it deserves.”
