Through the Lairig Ghru
An early season walk through Scotland’s highest, wildest mountain pass [1500 words 6 mins
About Mountains
walking across them, climbing up them, writing about them
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Latest posts
Moomintroll in the Mountains
The first full-length Moomintroll book, ‘Comet in Moominland’, features an underground river trip and a bit of climbing [800 words 4 mins
The Tale of Julie Tullis (Part 2)
Forty years ago, on 4th August 1986, Julie Tullis climbed K2. She never came down. [2500 words, 15 mins
The Ballad of Julie and Kurt: Broad Peak
Celebrating Julie Tullis: so much more than ‘first British woman on an 8000-er’ [2000 words 9 mins
Sociology of the Swamp
Carver Doon and Sherlock Holmes: Quagmires and Class anxiety in the 19th Century [1600 words 6 mins
Below Foxbones Rock
Short story set in Ennerdale [2300 words 10 mins]
You see yon precipice? Pillar Rock 1826
Two hundred years ago this week, Ennerdale shepherd John Atkinson made England’s first-ever rock climb.
The Farting Fellwalkers of 1940
Celebrating Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance, their cabbage diet, and some impressive winter walks. [1400 words 6 mins
Arthur Rimbaud: poet, degenerate, and radical rambler
The French Symbolist whose extreme rambling literally (and literarily) walked one of his legs off [1800 words 7 mins
The Hole under Jerusalem
The first 1% of a long fantasy novel about some underground mountaineering [1400 words 6 mins
A Tour around Piz Bernina
A self-created hut to hut trip through Switzerland and Italy
The World as Turnip
Happy 300th birthday to James Hutton, Scotland’s genius geologist. [1500 words, 6 mins
Lakeland vs Yorkshire Dales
Which of the two is more excellent? 1400 words 5 mins
The Gentle Art of Getting Lost
If a hill’s worth going up, then it’s worth getting lost on… [1500 words 6 mins
Chamber of Clouds
Ben Nevis, the only mountain ever to have earned a Nobel Prize. [1800 words 7 mins
Lake District : happy 75th!
A birthday card traditionally has a picture on the front and an emotive little poem on the inside. So here’s a greeting to England’s best loved hill district, designated national park on May 9th 1951.
Photographic Developments
Taking pictures in the hills: impossible, of course, in the days of heavy glass-plate cameras. Except it wasn’t…
Great Hell’s Gate and stairways to Heaven
Exploring the Infinite on the screes of Great Gable (899m) in the English Lake District [1100 words, 5 mins
Rannoch Moor: the unsettling space right in the middle of Scotland
"Liminal" spaces: the in-between, the nowhere, you didn’t ought to be here in the first place. Except, how else are you going to get to Fort William? [1300 words 6 mins
How pinky-brown was my valley
“Home is where one starts from,” says TS Eliot. Home in my case being the Permian-age New Red Sandstone of the valleys of southwest Scotland. [1800 words 7 mins
No it isn’t Scafell Pike!
For almost 90 years, surveyors have been concealing the true high-point of England “for safety reasons”. [1200 words 5 mins