The act of writing a book goes through many stages before completion. First, the seed of an idea tapped into my Notes app, later expanded until it is ready to be pitched to my publisher. Then the wonderful process of research and development, visiting new places, reading new books, meeting new people, before shaping everything together and writing it up, the Thesaurus.com tab a permanent fixture on my browser for months. Then come the illustrations, the edits, the Zoom calls with marketing and publicity teams, the cover design, more edits, the distribution of uncorrected proofs and the arrival, at last, of the beautiful, finished hardback copy in the post. The end stage, usually a year later, is the paperback - and as today marks the paperback publication of my seventh book The Bridleway: How Horses Shaped the British Landscapewith Bloomsbury, I thought I’d celebrate by sharing some of my favourite photos from the journey of writing this book.
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If you would like to order The Bridleway from Bookshop, Amazon, Waterstones, Hive, Bloomsbury or your bookseller of choice, that really would be wonderful. A lot of love and hard work goes into writing a book and every single person who reads it is so appreciated. Thank you!
Above: This photo of me trotting along Hayling Island beach in 2019 was taken around the time I first thought of my seed of an idea for the book - a history of our relationship with horses, and how their role as pet, vehicle and tool has reshaped the contours of our towns, cities and countryside.
Above: This was also a period when I was drawing equestrian portraits for commissions, something I really loved doing but in the end, the self-induced pressure made it not so fun. It did feed into my book idea, though, especially being around so many beautiful horses and their owners.
Above: The research begins! Here is my daughter Olive being nuzzled by a Dartmoor pony on our trip to the Haytor granite tramway, which I wrote about in Chapter 9: Moorstone.
Above: A delight for my love of industrial archaeology, this is the abandoned Haytor quarry from where granite was mined and carried to the nearest town by horse and cart. The winch and crane are still lying in the pool after all this time!
Above: We visited Marwell Zoo in Hampshire to see their herd of Przewalski’s horses, which are the closest thing we have left to truly ‘wild’ horses. They have amazing brush-like manes and zebra stripes on their knees and elbows.
Above: A New Year visit to the Uffington Chalk Horse in Oxfordshire, as seen on the front of the book. What a beautiful day this was! Fresh, January air and ravens flying through the valley below us, you can see the eye of the horse in this photo just below my own shadow.
Above: Sculpture of a horse’s head from the Parthenon (sometimes called the Elgin Marbles) in the British Museum, London. This horse was one of those that was said to draw the chariot of the moon goddess Selene as she rode across the sky each night.
Above: I spotted this old shop sign in Monmouth Street, London, and thought it was striking how common saddlers and harness makers must have been before motor cars became so commonplace.
Above: One of the working horses I shadowed for the morning at the Weald & Downland Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, together with their very knowledgeable and passionate handler Andy.
Above: A member of the Exmoor pony herd found at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, famous for its successful rewilding project and home to two free-roaming herds of ponies that are able to behave as closely as possible to how they would behave in the wild.
Above: A photo I took of a girl and her horse at the Wickham Horse Fair in Hampshire, one of the oldest horse fairs in the country and an annual gathering place for Traveller communities.
Above: The uncorrected proof copies that are sent out for early reads and reviews, usually without the final cover art or finishing touches.
Above: A box of finished hardbacks in all their glory! I created the final illustration for the front cover in consultation with the designers at Bloomsbury, inspired by the Uffington chalk horse I visited as part of my research.
Above: The window display I arranged and decorated for Petworth Bookshop in Sussex, complete with paper chalk horses, linocuts of Przewalski’s horses and illustrations drawn by hand on the glass.
Above: One of the best days! I was honoured to received the Elwyn Hartley-Edwards Award for Equine Writing from the British Horse Society. We had a great day at Newbury Racecourse, and I even won £40 on a race!
Thank you so much for following me down memory lane! It is very satisfying to see a book all the way through to paperback stage and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of it. I’ve since worked on a few more nature-related guide books which will be coming out soon, and I’m also writing/illustrating my first children’s book and novel which I’m hoping will both eventually see the light of day. Until then, thank you so much for reading The Bridleway - and if the paperback is your first encounter of my work, I hope you love it!
You can buy The Bridleway: How Horses Shaped the British Landscape at:
It's so lovely to see the paperback out (congrats, buddy!), and also some of these photos that illustrate passages from such a wonderful book!! X