News
16th February to 3rd March 2007 - Photographic Exhibition of a Year in the Life of GlencoeAt the Fort William Mountain Festival. Prints will be on sale. Bill Birkett will be giving a talk and slide show on the 26th February. More details are available at www.mountainfilmfestival.co.uk.
This winter - slideshows at Wilf's Cafe, Staveley
Slideshows will be on Borrowdale and the Duddon books. See Wilf's website for dates. Wilf's Cafe
Thursday 16th November 6pm - Times Past Book Launch
At Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere, by invite only.
18th November 06 4pm - Kendal Mountain Book Festival, book signing at K Village
More details available at www.mountainfilm.co.uk/book-festival
Saturday 28th October 06 11-12:30am - Official Launch of a Year in the Life of the Duddon ValleyEveryone is welcome to join me at Kendal Library Mountaineering Section for readings from the book, book signing and wine. See you there.
25 September 06 - A Year in the Life of the Duddon Valley now available
I've received my first copies and they should be in the shops this week. Read more here
25 September 06 - New Galleries
I've just added two new galleries to the site. Photo of the Month and Langdales Photo of the Week. I'll be adding to them regularly.
15 September 06 - Cover Picture for 'Scafell - Portrait of a Mountain'
The publishers have decided on the cover photo for my new book. Read more about it here
July 06 - Launch of billbirkett.co.uk
Thanks to my web developer my site is finally up and running! Please let me know what you think of it. Criticisms, comments and requests for more information are all welcome. Please email me.
July 06 - 'A walk with Bill Birkett' by Ronald Turnbull, to be published in Lakeland Walker
Those of us who write about the Lake District can get a bit resentful of Bill Birkett. It's not just that he's a fine climber, who's been up and down the crags from Borrowdale to Coniston not to mention the underground rock walls of Hodge Close Quarry. It's not just that he's also a natural photographer. What really gets our goats is the way he's placed himself strategically bang in the middle of the Lake District; and hasn't just been there all his life, but for a hundred years or so longer than that. When trying to get that dawn picture of Wetherlam, it does help if you can open one eye, roll out of bed and haul the tripod up into the field behind your house. The cover picture of A Year in the Life of the Langdale Valleys: trees bright with dew, snow on the tops, the Three Shires Inn with its chimneys just sticking out of the morning mist: I'm convinced he took that one barefoot in his pyjamas, then just hopped back under his still-warm duvet...
Latest Projects
Times Past - The English Lake District
This is the reproduction of Alfred Heaton Cooper’s paintings which were first published by A@C Black in 1905. Bill Birkett and Jane Renouf set the Edwardian scene of this period whilst Rosemary Anderson has penned her own captions to the paintings. Some of Bill’s photographs show the painted scene as it is today. This book of will be published in the Autumn.
From the cover ...
This is the 3rd volume of Bill Birkett’s prize-winning and widely praised valley portraits through the seasons, taking as its subject one of the lesser known but perhaps most varied and beautiful of all Lake District valleys, the little visited and remote Duddon.
Loved, and celebrated in a famous sonnet sequence by Wordsworth, the river Duddon runs from its origins on the southern slopes of Pike O’Blisco at the foot of Wrynose Pass into the sea, and more than in any other valley in the Lakes it is the river which sets the scene and dominates the landscape. With Weatherlam and the Coniston Fells to the east, and Harter Fell and the Ulpha Fells to its west, the valley still retains, more perhaps than anywhere else in the district, the timeless and unspoiled agricultural character which so characterises the Lakes in the popular (and poetic) imagination. Stone walls and solitary stone or white painted longhouse farms with barns dot the landscape, with no significant signs of urban or even village life. Herdwick sheep, solitary walkers and farmers are the only visible inhabitants.
Bill Birkett’s camera has caught not just these features, but the rocks, the crags, the fauna and the flora and , above all, the magical and beguiling river in a celebration of another corner of the district that he loves and knows so well.
After three volumes in his prize-winning and widely praised valley portraits through the seasons, Bill Birkett turns his gaze to the awe-inspiring massif of Scafell, the highest and most powerful group of mountains in England. Glimpsed from afar, Scafell presents an alluring and sublime skyline, an impressive wave of naked piled rock, sharp ridge and steep crag, soaring high above shadow-filled hanging coves and deep valleys. Rise to these heights and you are walking on the roof of England, high above precipices that have captivated and challenged climbers and travellers for some two hundred years. In 1802 Coleridge rested from his daring exploits at the summit to write 'surely the first Letter ever written from the top of Sca' Fell!' By the mid nineteenth century, with Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes a bestseller since 1810, the railways were opening up this remote region to lovers of the romantic and sublime. Intrepid travellers set out to explore it on foot and horseback, while the first recorded rock climb took place on Scafell in 1815. In the 1880s the Keswick-based Abraham Brothers began their superb series of black-and-white photographic portraits, which have had an unparalleled influence on perceptions of the English landcape. Bill Birkett's portrait takes us into the heart of the Scafell range. In pictures and text he reveals five different approaches with the details and panoramas that unfold on each ascent. His study is completed by essays on the region'’s history, geology, flora and fauna, and its paramount importance in the history of mountaineering and fell-walking. With three generations of his own family at the daring edge of mountaineering breakthroughs on Scafell, he brings a unique insight into the many moods of this magnificent mountain.