Kinder Scout

'An exceptional book.' Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words, Landmarks and Mountains of the Mind ‘We made Kinder Scout, not just metaphorically, or metaphysically, not just with our stories and our battles, but literally changed its shape, from the peat washing off its summit, to the drystone walls that turn the hillside into a harmonious grid, the trees that are and more often aren’t there, to the creatures that we’ve allowed to remain and those we’ve done away with. It’s our mountain.’ In 1951 the Peak District was designated the UK’s first national park: a commitment to protect and preserve our countryside and wild places. Sandwiched between Manchester and Sheffield, and sitting at the base of the Pennines, it is home to Kinder Scout, Britain’s most popular ‘mountain’, a beautiful yet featureless and disorientating plateau which barely scrapes the 600-metre contour, whose lower slopes bore witness in 1932 to a movement of feet, a pedestrian rebellion, which helped shape modern access legislation: the Kinder Mass Trespass. But Kinder Scout’s story is about much more than the working class taking on the elite. Marked by the passage of millions of feet and centuries of farming, a graveyard for lost souls and doomed aircraft, this much-loved mountain is a sacred canvas on which mankind has scratched and scraped its likeness for millennia. It is a record of our social and political history, of conflict and community. Writer Ed Douglas and photographer John Beatty are close friends and have a shared history with Kinder going back decades. In this unique collaboration they reveal the social, political, cultural and ecological developments that have shaped the physical and human landscape of this enigmatic and treasured hill. Kinder Scout: The People’s Mountain is a celebration of a northern English mountain and our role in its creation.

Ed Douglas has been climbing for over thirty-five years and has been a writer and editor for the last thirty. He launched the magazine On The Edge while at university in Manchester, and has published eight books about mountains and their people. His books include biographies of Tenzing Norgay, rock-climbing visionary Ben Moon and the late British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves. His ghostwritten autobiography of Ron Fawcett, Rock Athlete, won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 2010. Three of the essays in The Magician’s Glass were either shortlisted for or won at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in Canada. Douglas’s journalistic work most often appears in The Observer and The Guardian. He is the current editor of the Alpine Journal and lives in Sheffield with his wife Kate. They have two grown-up children.

John Beatty is outstanding among contemporary British nature, travel and adventure photographers, his international reputation securely based on a vast portfolio of extraordinary images from around the world that celebrate the beauty, variety and magnificence of landscape and nature. John shoots for a range of national international commercial clients and his work appears frequently in British and international media. His books include The Pure Land: A Celebration of Wild Places, Sula: Seabird Hunters of Lewis, and Wild Vision. Passionate about wilderness experience and its value, he publishes the annual Wild Nature Diary for the John Muir Trust, the leading wild land conservation charity in the UK. John lives in Bamford, in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District, with his wife Jan. He walks and cycles every day among his home moors when he’s not travelling more distant parts of the globe.

Discounts & P&P

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In addition, we offer FREE standard UK P&P for orders, along with options to upgrade the delivery service at checkout.

Postage costs are dependent on order weight (book/s weight plus packing materials) and are calculated automatically upon checkout, before payment is taken. Full details of our delivery and returns information can be found here. 

UK Delivery

We offer FREE standard UK P&P for orders: orders are sent Royal Mail Second Class as standard and should arrive within two to three working days. The option to upgrade UK shipping to Royal Mail 24 Next Day Delivery is available at checkout.

International Delivery

International orders are sent by Royal Mail International Tracked. Deliveries can take between a few days and a couple of weeks to arrive, depending on the delivery location. Please contact us if your country is not listed.

Dispatch

Update: September 2022. Most orders received through the Vertebrate Publishing Adventure Books website are dispatched from Gardners in Eastbourne, UK; some orders (such as signed copies of pre-orders, or limited stock items) are sent from our office in Sheffield, UK. If your order is for multiple items, you may receive more than one package, though we try to avoid this (if applicable, you would only be charged once for shipping). Orders received before 11 a.m. are dispatched the same day; orders received after 11 a.m. are usually dispatched the following business day. You will be sent a notification email when your order has been dispatched. If we are temporarily out of stock of a title we will advise by email.

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Returns

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If you're returning something because it's not suitable, you'll need to pay the postage costs to return it to us. We process most returns the day they arrive with us, and certainly within seven working days. Goods must be returned to us within 21 days.