davidclensy.com

There was a peculiar sense of unreality as I found myself standing at a lectern earlier this week talking to an audience about Walking the White Horses.

After many years of attending other writers’ book talks, to suddenly be the person at the front doing the speaking gave the whole evening a dreamlike quality. But the audience members at the event at Wiltshire Museum in Devizes were lovely and supportive, asking lots of nice (not too tricky!) questions during the Q&A at the end. Charlie and I even got to sign a few books.

Walking the White Horses came about as a project in a very indirect way – and consequently the success of the book in the last month has come as quite a shock.

In 2020, as the world took a strange turn around us, I decided it was time for a change. Leaving journalism behind after 20 years in the industry, by day, I became a copywriter for a global, multidisciplinary engineering firm in Bath. But by evening and weekend, I determined to become a writer of books.

I had written a few little books before over the years – a history of Looe Island in Cornwall, another about a 19th Century Liverpool eccentric, The Mole of Edge Hill, and even a little walking book about the Wolds Way up in East Yorkshire. But this would be different. This time, I was determined to write my first novel. And I did. Hopefully one day, people might even get to read it.

It took about six months. Then I stopped. I did a few rewrites, and then set about the ominous task of “querying agents”. But this process of sending your draft novel to agents is famously protracted, long-winded and fraught with rejection. Everyone I spoke to advised me that the best thing to do, was to focus on writing something else – something entirely different, during the long dark months of querying. So my attention turned to a work of narrative non-fiction – Walking the White Horses – which ironically has seen the light of day long before my novel.

In the summer I had set off on a long walk, seeking to tackle the 93 miles of Wiltshire’s White Horse Trail, joined in the adventure by my 10-year-old son, Charlie. Walking the White Horses, follows our progress as we make their way from horse to horse. The book takes the reader on a meander through the natural wonders of southern England’s chalk downland environment, its people, heritage and wildlife. Along the way we explore the story of these striking equine hill figures and the role they have played in the cultures, belief systems and lived experiences of Wiltshire folk across the centuries.

As we walked around the route by day, I had consumed all the books I could find on the history of the White Horses, so while not an historian, I wanted to tell the stories of the horses themselves over the centuries, as well as the story of our long walk.

I lost my own father during the period when Charlie and I were walking the trail, so the book very much became a portrait of father and son relationships more broadly, an homage to the passing on of life from generation to generation, and a celebration of spending time together out and about in our spectacularly beautiful landscape.

“…to suddenly be the person at the front doing the

speaking gave the evening a dreamlike quality.”

David Clensy on promoting Walking the White Horses

The reality is, the whole project turned around very quickly – a summer of walking, a few weeks to tidy up all that I’d written during the walking period, and without a second thought about agents or publishers, I simply self-published it via Amazon KDP. After all, this was just a bit of fun. But then my hastily put together press release caught the attention of a few publications and to my delight a number of local independent bookshops and visitor attractions were happy to stock the book.

After an initial wave of interest, I expected things to die down pretty quickly, but the sales have kept coming on Amazon – for a while, it even hit the number one slot on Amazon’s “Countryside Books” chart.

As the Christmas rush started to kick in, I began to dash around local towns like Marlborough, Devizes and Warminster again, restocking the shelves of the indies with more copies. Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far – and watch this space for the novel in 2024!