OWPG
AGM weekend 12-15 October
Welcome to the 2018 AGM weekend awards special. Over the next sixteen pages
you’ll be able to read about the OWPG award winners and why they richly deserved
their prizes. Before that though, thanks need to go to those patient souls who worked hard
to make the weekend a success: Firstly to Stan Abbott for organising both the weekend and
the accommodation; to David Ramshaw, the awards administrator; to the award judges and
sponsors; to Sabi Phagura - now a member of OWPG - for hosting a fascinating social media
workshop; to the various organisers of the weekend’s activities and walks; to Andrew and the
staff at the Simonsbath Hotel; to Chris Howes and Karen Frankel for stepping in at the last
minute to shoot the award ceremony photos; and last, but far from least, to Jonathan Williams
and Cicerone for hosting a celebratory reception on the Saturday evening.
OWPG AWARDS 2018
Outdoor Book
Winner Andrew Bibby
Back Roads Through Middle England / published by Gritstone Press
This has been a book a long
time in the preparation
I
sometimes compare the process of writing a book to
that of baking a cake. There’s always the uncertainty
when you start off as to what the end product will be
like. Will the cake come out of its baking tin perfectly
risen, cooked and ready to eat? Will the book come
together, so that when the last chapter is eventually
concluded, it works for readers in the way that you
hoped it would?
This time, I feel my book Back Roads through Middle
England has, as it were, come good – and I’m absolutely
12 Outdoor focus | winter 2018
thrilled that the OWPG judges for the Outdoor Book
award appear to have thought so, too. This has been a
book a long time in the preparation. Years and years ago,
when I lived in the south Midlands, I was intrigued by
the way that the beautiful stone-built villages of north
Northamptonshire seemed so similar to those in the
Cotswolds. And indeed similar, too, to villages I knew in
west Dorset and east Somerset.
The reason, of course, is the line of Jurassic oolite
limestone which snakes its way across England from
the English Channel up to (and just slightly beyond)
the Humber. This is what the landscape historian WG
Hoskins once described as England’s great stone belt –
though, given the way it crosses the country, you could
argue it’s more of a shoulder-strap than a belt.
This was the geological line on the map which, I