James Cropper Wainwright Prize held in Cumbria

The James Cropper Wainwright Prize has been held in Cumbria for the first time in its 10 year history.

The awards, for nature writing, honour the writer of the pictorial guides to the Lake District, Alfred Wainwright, and this year they were held in the town he lived, Kendal.

Wainwright Prize Director, Alastair Giles, says, "We thought where better than to come up and celebrate than in Kendal, his hometown.

"So it's nice to come full circle. The prize actually celebrates all the things that he stood for. So it's about going out and enjoying the outdoors and embracing nature. And the prize has developed into conservation and climate change as well.

"So it's really about tackling all those issues and trying to work out exactly how we protect the nature and the countryside that we love and that Alfred loved so much."

There are three coveted prizes that everybody wants to win. Dr Amy-Jane Beer's book 'The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wilderness', won the Nature Writing category. It's about the River Rawthey near Sedbergh in Cumbria, where her kayaking friend Kate died.

Dr Amy-Jane Beer said: "Losing her changed my relationship with rivers and just noticing so much more about the river that I'd previously had a sort of adrenaline-fueled technical relationship with, I was seeing the way the light fell and these little micro features in the water: the eddy line, the exact point in the water where water flowing one direction meets water flowing in the other.

"And it felt like the difference between life and death is this tiny, tiny thing, fresh and clear and life-giving, but it's also going somewhere. And so it gives you a sense of responsibility for looking after that flow, in the same way that we're responsible for the wider world for generations to come.

"So there's wonderful metaphors in rivers that relate to life and responsibility."

Guy Shrubsole visited three temperate rainforests in the Lake District for his book 'The Lost Rainforests of Britain',  the Writing for Conservation winner.

Guy said: "I've been utterly besotted with them. Just to go into them, see them dripping with rainwater, every surface glowing green with the mosses, the lichens festooning the branches.

"All the wonderful creatures living in and amongst these forests. And the UK has an incredible abundance of these amazing species. I mean after the last ice age, Britain may have had something like 20% of its land cover made up of temperate rainforests. Spool forward to today: less than 1% of Britain.

"We cut it down over the centuries to make way for farmland, for fuel and so on."

Lee Schofield is a judge this year. His book 'Wild Fell', about his work with the RSPB in Haweswater, was highly commended in last year's awards.

Lee said: "Haweswater and the Lake District more widely just has all these amazing stories, you know, at Haweswater we had the only population of Golden Eagles for decades, the only ones in the whole of England. And they've gone now sadly.

"The reservoir when it was created, flooded a village. And I realised that my colleagues and I were all, you know, part of that landscape story now.

"And writing the book was a way to communicate that and make people realise that change in these big upland dramatic, popular, beautiful landscapes can be a really good thing."

Alfred Wainwright's stepdaughter attended the awards and thinks he would have been proud these writers are inspiring a new generation to love nature.

She told ITV Border, "He would have been pleased that people felt as he did about nature; that people thought it was so important; he would feel that the world is a better place because of it."

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