On 15th February I went for a walk up West Lomond in Fife and, as I walked through the fields everything around me screamed ‘SPRING!’ for the first time this year. It was only 7C but it was a clear blue-sky day, utterly calm with a warm sun. There was some gorse blooming on the side of the path and skylarks twittered over the fields. It looked, felt and sounded like spring….but was it? None of those signs are unique to spring of course. Beautiful days occur all year round, as do gorse flowers. A winter sun can be warm…

Award-winning writer Linda Cracknell gives her tips on sharing your walking experiences through the written word. After a day out in the hills, or even tramping for a couple of weeks on a long-distance footpath, some of us have the urge to commit the experience to writing. It might be scribbled in a journal as a personal record, a walk report or blog post with tips for those considering something similar, or even something crafted to communicate a story to a wider audience. One of the things I love about doing this is that I get to take the journey…

David Lintern wrestles with the outdoors, inside. I’ll confess that writing anything about ‘the outdoors’ at the moment is a struggle. I’m driven to distraction by world events. Five minutes chat at the school gate or surfing the stormy seas of social media and it’s clear that regardless of political persuasion, we’re mostly confused, worried and angry. As the Chinese curse has it, we live ‘in interesting times’. The call of the wild is strong when our human world is fraught, but I’m resistant to the idea of the mountains as pure escapism, because I think by getting out we’re…

You might imagine a tiny, low-lying Scottish island in the middle of the Atlantic, 20 miles from any other community and with only a lighthouse between it and the coast of Canada to the west, to be an inhospitable place. Indeed, the Hebridean Isle of Colonsay, measuring only 10 miles by two miles if you include its even smaller “semi-detached” neighbour Oronsay, is inhabited by fewer than 150 people and requires a two-hour boat trip from the Scottish ferry town of Oban, available once a day in summer and three times in winter. Yet the island has a surprisingly sunny…

When I get back to the car safely after a long and tiring walk in the hills I remove my shoes, pour myself tea from my flask, and then I sit down in the open car boot. This is my quiet meditative moment before driving home when I reflect on the walk I’ve just had, breathe deeply and soak up the atmosphere one last time. And that’s when it appears. Sometimes it does so from the extremes of my peripheral vision, other times it seems to materialise from nowhere right in front of me. But wherever it comes from it…