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…

I’M beginning to feel a little like the Rev IM Jolly. The only time the Glesca clergyman and I are on the telly is at Christmas! This year our two hour-long programmes feature a campervan journey between Dornoch Point in Sutherland and North Ronaldsay, the most remote island in the Orkney archipelago. Last year we broke from our previous format of filming a long walk somewhere in Scotland. We’d walked the length of the Hebrides; we’d crossed Scotland from coast to coast a couple of time; created a new long distance walk in Sutherland; backpacked the length of Skye and…

As I sit here at home I can hear the surging roar of approaching gusts of wind. They’re whooshing through the tree branches and clunking at the wheelie bins. They’re whistling through tiny gaps in the double glazing, prompting a couple of the interior doors to creak ever so slightly. And between the gusts I can hear a constant low hum as though someone has left a diesel engine running outside. These are the sounds of a Scottish gale and, strange as it may seem I think I’ve actually missed them. A bit. Not because I carry any particular torch…

Mid November and the forecast for our walk was bad enough that I wondered if we would still go. After the previous day of high winds and sleet, it was now to be steady precipitation and no more than 2 or 3 degrees. But as we gathered around the minibus at the Corbenic Community in slight drizzle, no one raised the question. Curtains of cloud hung just below 1000 feet, and were pulled open occasionally to show the surrounding hills marked with the low boundary of new snow. This was my first outing with Corbenic’s hill-walking group, a weekly event…

Cameron McNeish admits to having been hugely inspired by Sir Chris Bonington’s early failures, rather than his successes. IT was a long time ago and I was lurching between jobs, unsure of my future and dreading the thought of suffering some corporate nine-to-five regime for the next 40 years. The only things I really wanted to do were to climb mountains and explore wild places and at that relatively youthful stage in my life I couldn’t think of a career that would enable me to do that. At 24 I was married with a young son and I didn’t have…