CHARITABLE gamekeepers who stripped off for a nude calendar are more than halfway to their fundraising target - even before it hits the shops!

An initial print of 3,000 calendars featuring the 10 gamekeepers and one water bailiff from the Dunsop Bridge area has already been pre-sold.

Now another 2,500 have been printed up by the Accrington firm which donated the first batch as the game-for-a-laugh gamekeepers celebrate reaching the £10,000 mark.

And now they've gone one better than the dozens of others groups which have tried to ape the success of the WI's famous Yorkshire Calendar Girls - by getting approval from the photographer who first snapped the members of Rylstone WI.

The calendar was launched last month at the Country Landowners' Association Game Fair at Blenheim Palace, followed by an appearance at the Lowther Horse Trials in Cumbria.

The latter trip raised more than £2,500 in sales - money from which is going to Macmillan Nurses and the National Gamekeeping Organisation - prompting a fresh print run.

The calendar - which runs from January 2005 to January 2006 to include a full shooting year - shows the men in various countryside settings, with very little covering their modesty. Now the men are getting used to the idea of being on the walls of thousands of homes next year.

John Clarke, one of the men who dreamed up the idea, and also known as Mr March, said: "At the events we have been to, there have been huge queues of people waiting to get their calendars autographed.

"We got an email from Terry Logan, from the Rylstone calendar, saying he had seen many imitations of their calendar, but not many as good as ours. That's real recognition but it is all getting surreal now. It only started as a bit of a laugh."

Initially the men - who first hit up on the idea while drinking at the Inn at Whitewell - planned to raise a few hundred pounds. A loose target of £20,000 was set when the calendar got a positive reaction from sponsors, and now the calendars are set to go on sale in shops throughout the Ribble Valley.