A WHARFEDALE author and poet has seen his fourth collection of poems published - People in a Landscape.

Colin Speakman, of Ilkley, is perhaps best known as a transport and countryside campaigner and author or co-author of over 50 books about walking and the outdoor, including The Dales Way, which he was largely responsible for establishing in the late 1960s.

A keen walker, he is a Vice President of both the Yorkshire Dales Society and the West Riding Area of the Ramblers Association, and the Chairman of the Dales Way Association.

However, in addition to his other writing, Colin is also a poet with a growing regional reputation. In the preface to his fourth collection of poems People in a Landscape he explains that poetry gives him a chance ”to celebrate our region’s spectacular natural beauty and cultural richness in a different way”.

Poet and critic Mary Sheepshank said: “Here are poems to be read again and again, often finding something fresh we missed the first time, for he has that enviable ability to set our own imagination working”.

People in a Landscape (ISBN 978-0906744-4-20) can be purchased direct from the publisher, Fighting Cock Press, 45 Middlethorpe Drive, York, Y024 1NA (pmk@pkirk304.force9.co.uk) price £4.50, post free.