At the end of our first day on the Cateran Trail in August 2013, a friend and I found our way to a large plastic-wood bar at the Spittal of Glenshee Hotel. A cavernous room was crowded with families, runners, walkers, and middle-aged driving tourists. Propping up the bar, an ageing cowboy jangled his spurs, raised his hat to us, and began telling us the long story of his broken back. ‘Where’s your horse?’ I asked, only half-joking. I imagined riding the route we’d just taken from Kirkmichael, climbing from Enochdu to pass the wooden hut where Queen Victoria had…

FILM-maker Richard Else and I have worked together for the best part of a quarter of a century. In that time he has endured the idiosyncratic nature of this curmudgeonly outdoor writer with patience and good humour, and has persevered with fortitude on those occasions when some of my own hare-brained schemes were clearly impractical. But Richard endured a tough apprenticeship before he began working with me – he was the television producer who coaxed the reclusive and cantankerous Lake District guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright onto our television screens and worked closely with him for several years. At one point…

At first it’s barely noticeable. A tinny resonance of indistinct origin, easily ignored amongst the background hums and whirs of the home. I stop crunching my toast and listen. The morning radio presenters are doing an outside broadcast from a noisy location – car engines come and go, voices rise and fall, and birdsong from the other end of the country feels as close to me as my mug of breakfast tea. But it’s none of those things. It’s probably just the mechanical twittering of starlings on the farm buildings next door, but still I squint my eyes and stare…