I set up Inkcap Journal in 2020 because I believed that nature in Britain deserved deeper and more nuanced coverage in the media.
But starting a publication from scratch is no easy feat. I had no funding, and journalism – particularly the kind I wanted to publish – is expensive to produce. It requires writers who are willing to spend time with a topic; it means buying train fares and paying hotel bills, so those writers can travel to distant destinations; it involves commissioning photographers who can capture a sense of place in a way that enhances the words.
For the first couple of years of Inkcap Journal’s existence, I relied solely on reader subscriptions and donations to fund coverage. I wrote most of the features myself. But I wanted to provide a place for other people and new perspectives. Moreover, I wanted to commission the kind of content that takes time, in volumes that I did not always possess myself.
Thanks to the Pebble Trust, I have spent the last two and a half years editing and publishing the kind of features that I had envisaged when I was first starting out: longform explorations and detailed investigations that get to the heart of changes and challenges facing the Scottish landscape today.
Our stories have explored the loss of rainforest and the memory of peat. We have looked at what it would take to return the wolf to the Highlands, and whether conservationists can really save the capercaillie. We have explored the social side of environmental change, too, including the innovative Climavore diet designed to combat climate change and land degradation, and the role that language plays in framing our perspectives of the natural world.
There are a few pieces that particularly encapsulate my vision for Inkcap Journal. In particular, I was thrilled when Adam Weymouth agreed to write a feature on bere barley, a crop that has been in cultivation in Scotland since the Bronze Age, and which is enjoying a resurgence today. Adam was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2018. I had read and admired his book, Kings of the Yukon, and had secretly hoped I might persuade him to write for Inkcap Journal one day. With funding from the Pebble Trust, I was able to fund his travel to Uist and Dundee so that he could truly understand the communities and scientists reviving this ancient grain. The resulting feature was the most successful of those funded by this grant.
The funding also meant I could repeat an earlier investigation I had run into council rewilding across England, this time including Scotland in our analysis – something that many readers had requested, but which had previously been unaffordable, given the time and effort involved. We ran this investigation in tandem with the Guardian, and our findings were cited by National Geographic, providing a level of outreach that I could never have achieved alone.
However, perhaps the greatest value of the Pebble Trust grant was that it enabled me to keep Inkcap Journal running during and following my maternity leave. As any parent will confirm, it is not easy to write with a newborn. Without funding, the flow of features would have necessarily slowed to a dribble after my daughter was born. Instead, I could rely on the talents of so many writers across Scotland, who continued to keep their eye to the ground when I could not. The value of being able to commission content at this point was immeasurable: Inkcap Journal would not exist today in its current form without it.
You can view the full collection of articles on Scotland that were funded by the Pebble Trust at View the full collection at https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/tag/pebble/.
For more information and to subscribe to Inkcap Journal please visit https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/. Please consider subscribing to keep this important longform journalism alive.
A huge thank you to Sophie Yeo for providing this month’s guest blog post.
