I know from our social media pages – and my own experience – that looking at photographs of nature, and of wild landscapes and well-loved places that are currently out of reach are a comfort for many of us in trying to get through these testing times. So I was delighted when this stunning book of Scottish panoramas – taken by Craig Aitchison – dropped through the letterbox for review. Craig was the inaugural winner of the Scottish Landscape Photographer of the Year competition, and this is his second book – following on from the successful The Highlands: Land &…

The original guide to Scotland’s mountain environment aimed at hillwalkers and climbers has just been updated with a new edition. When Hostile Habitats was first published in 2006 it brought together information on the full context of Scotland’s hills – geology, landscape, flora and fauna, and human history – into one accessibly-written guidebook aimed at hillwalkers. The book proved popular and this second edition keeps to the same arrangement of nine chapters, written by different experts, but has been expanded and updated to reflect changes in understanding. A hefty hardback, this is a book to dip in and out of…

It’s not often that a book is stunningly beautiful to look at but also conveys an important message – but “Scotland – A Rewilding Journey” may be one such. This new book is published by Scotland: The Big Picture, a not-for-profit social enterprise set up by a group of Highlands-based conservation photographers. Their track record is a strong one, with previous books including a study of the red squirrel, and – earlier this year – ‘The Lynx and Us’ which took an in-depth look at what it might be like if Scotland decided to reintroduce the lynx. This new book,…

YEARS ago I commissioned a young UIAA Mountain Guide to write a feature for the very first issue of Footloose, an outdoor magazine I edited in the late seventies. I’d read some of Rob Collister’s writings in the superb Mountain magazine and was very impressed. Some years later when I was editor of Climber Magazine I spent the day rock-climbing with Jim Perrin at Tremadoc in North Wales and in the evening Jim invited Rob and his wife Netti to join us for dinner. In the course of the evening I learned much about this gentle mountaineer; his expeditions in…

Climbing the Munros has long been a mainstream activity for hillwalkers, and many also aim to climb the Corbetts (Scottish peaks from 2500 to 3000 feet high), either after completing the Munros, or at the same time. Whilst a too-keen obsession with bagging hills can blind us to the other joys that going to the mountains can bring, there seems little doubt that for many people having a list of hills to complete is a way of linking many brief days out into a single, bigger, satisfying adventure. The Grahams (peaks from 2000 to 2500 feet), though, have been the…