A writer who was inspired to blaze his own trail

It's hard to avoid comparing Paul Hannon with Britain's most famous walker. Both of them grew up in Northern mill towns, and from an early age both became passionate about the wild country on their doorsteps.

To escape the humdrum of office jobs, each self-published guidebooks to their favourite walks. In the beginning Hannon even laid out his pages with handwritten text, sketches and maps in Wainwright style.

Both remained enigmas for many years. In the case of Wainwright, the adoption of a reclusive lifestyle was by choice, and it was only in his late-70s that he was coaxed out of the shadows for TV, Desert Island Discs and a big London publisher in order to sell more books for his beloved animal rescue charity.

Hannon smiles at the suggestion that he might also have been a recluse. "I'm afraid my lack of a public profile's simply due to the fact that I don't do publicity very well. I love the walking and love putting books together, but when it comes to promoting myself I'm terrible."

Which makes you wonder how well he might have done if he was actually trying. Since his first guide appeared more than 25 years ago he has sold over 400,000 copies. Just as climbing the Lake District fells is unthinkable without a Wainwright, it's now hard to imagine walking in most parts of Yorkshire without a Hannon.

But his reach extends even further, devoting whole series of books to the Lakes, the Peak District, Lancashire and the North Pennines, plus 12 guides to some of the most tramped long-distance footpaths in northern England.

Hannon lives with his partner, Lisa, in an ordinary suburban street within a mile of his Keighley childhood home. He is 52, gently spoken, frequently smiling and as different from Wainwright's crusty public persona as you could imagine.

He left school when he was 16, having done "reasonably well" at O-levels, he says, but had no idea what he wanted to do. At first he went full-time at his Saturday job in the local Currys electrical shop, then after a few months became a clerk processing benefits claims at the DHSS. The regular hours gave him time for walking in the Lakes, the Dales and Scotland, and what was supposed to be a stop-gap ended up being his main source of income for 13 years. What changed his

life, he freely admits, was Wainwright. In 1977, Hannon and a friend walked Wainwright's creation, the Coast to Coast long-distance path from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast. At the end of his guidebook to the walk Wainwright had written: "The map of England is an oyster very rich in pearls. Plan your own marathon and do something never done before."

"I took him at his word," says Hannon, "and dreamt up a route I called the Westmorland Way, a 100-mile footpath from Appleby to Arnside on Wainwright's own patch, trying to make the pages look like his, although I'm the first to admit they weren't up to his standards.

"At first the book was just a hobby, but 18 months down the line I thought it might be good enough to have published."

Publishers he sent it to were worried his work looked too much like Wainwright's. So he decided to publish it himself, just as Wainwright had done with his very first Pictorial Guide in 1955.

In 1983, Hannon had 3,000 copies of the Westmorland Way printed, and quickly followed it up with guides to two more long-distance footpath creations – The Furness Way from Arnside to Ravenglass and The Cumberland Way, completing the circle to Appleby. Encouraged by their healthy sales, Hannon tested the market in his native Yorkshire with a book on shorter walks in Wharfedale. By local publishing standards it was an instant blockbuster, and over different editions would go on to become his greatest success – almost 30,000 copies have been bought so far. His second biggest-seller has been his own guide to the Coast to Coast Walk, published in 1992. Sales now stand at about 20,000 copies, but when it first came out Hannon found himself briefly the centre of media attention.

The previous year Wainwright had died at 84, and before then he had sold the rights of his books to Michael Josephs of London. Out of the blue, Hannon received a solicitor's letter from the publishers claiming that his own version of the Coast to Coast had infringed their copyright.

"Well, yes, I had done it in Wainwright's style, with my own maps and drawings. But I'd researched everything myself.

"There wasn't one word of his. To an outsider, perhaps, it looked similar but in fact I'd changed the route from the one he suggested to provide less road-walking."

In the end, Hannon volunteered to pay 500 to Wainwright's animal charity and put an acknowledgement in the book. "It all got a bit heavy for a time," he says. "What was scary about it was that I'd given up my DHSS job to work on my books full time. I had three young bairns at home, and the solicitor I consulted about it told me the whole thing could cost me ludicrous amounts."

He steadily covered most of Yorkshire with his guidebooks, and when not researching new walks or producing book pages back in Keighley he drove round booksellers and small country shops with his car boot loaded with books.

"Those were halcyon days. I got to know just about everyone who ran a little shop in the Dales. The books were selling brilliantly, and most of them paid me on the spot."

In 1994, he stopped emulating Wainwright's style of handwritten pages and started typesetting them.

This was not a response to the big guns of Wainwright's publishers, he adds firmly. Rather, it made revising the books much easier.

He is almost 20 titles into a new series called Short Scenic Walks and is setting out on the Coast to Coast for the third time this spring with

a view to producing a completely revised edition of his guidebook.

When Wainwright was the same age as Hannon, he had produced only three of his seven great guidebooks to the Lakes, so with 70 titles under his belt it's possible that Hannon hasn't yet got into his stride.

Asking him why he does it, his reply could have come straight from the great man himself.

"There's no such thing as a bad walk. You can go somewhere that's gorgeous but the weather's poor and still enjoy yourself. Or you can be somewhere that's average, a bit mediocre, but if the weather's good you will find it's wonderful. Walking is still better than how we spend 90 per cent of our lives."

Paul Hannon has four new titles in the Short Scenic Walks series: Upper Wensleydale; Lower Wensleydale, Ingleton & Western Dales; and Ribblesdale with Sedbergh & Dentdale; Swaledale; Ribble Valley; Around Pendle coming

later.