Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

'Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig ...' Hallaig - the lost village of Raasay - is a powerful place. Arguably, it has become a shibboleth for the soul of Gaelic culture. To visit it, to just be there momentarily and feel the resonance of the place, is to know the fragility of place and home, of how kinship can be shattered and how loss can invade a land. Aptly, Hallaig is now a site of pilgrimage for those who value the universal lessons of history.  There are t errible reasons for the loss of Hallaig. Its silent mouths of abandoned shielings, the dumb sheep meandering amongst the ruins, whisper with Sorley MacLean's poetry. The place misses the sounds of day-to-day community, and all around the woods and burns and slopes this tough but rich landscape once made this a hardy paradise under the eastern cliffs of Raasay. Facing east to the dawn and overlooking the peninsula of Applecross and the berry-dark depths of the Inner Sound, the walk to Hallaig leads quietly...

The Moray Firth’s sand-bitten southern coast, between Findhorn and Nairn, is home to Scotland’s most cautionary tract of land. Now a wilderness of maritime forest, dunes, salt marsh and spits of sand, its human history has been dated to the Bronze Age, around 1300 BC, but it is a territory that since glacial times would have been mobile and mutable. The Laich of Moray is the fertile strip of plain squeezed between the foothills of the Cairngorms and the Moray Firth’s south coast. In Gaelic it is called Machair Mhoireibh (the machair of Moray), a perfect habitat for golf courses and rich arable farmland, threaded by the glacially-rivered straths of Nairn, Findhorn and Spey. Culbin is an old parish which is now buried under 28 square kilometres of duneland and recent forestry. Sweeping east of Narin and curving in to rise up to its greatest heights above the estuary of the River Findhorn, it is now managed by Forestry Commission Scotland, but it is notable that this is a humanl...

Edinburgh University Press is the home of scholarship for Scottish history, in particular the history of the Highlands, having published the likes of Eric Richards' Debating The Highland Clearances, Tom Furniss's Discovering the Footsteps of Time , Robert Dodgshon's history of the rural environment called No Stone Unturned , and John Roberts' history of the Highland clans Feuds, Forays and Rebellions .  A tremendous resource for the lay historian and scholar alike is the journal  Northern Scotland , which is moving to two issues a year as of 2019. It is the home for seminal articles on the history of the Highlands and Islands, including such popular issues as land ownership, culture, emigration and diaspora, and biography. It is chaired by  Annie Tindley  who is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University. Annie is also editor of the new book series at EUP, called 'Scotland's Land' which has just published its first volu...

BROAD LAW The rolling hills east of the modern motorway of the M74 hold much more character and history than they appear from the west, where they are now flanked by forestries of spruce and wind-farms. In medieval times this was a Scottish royal hunting ground – the ‘Ettrick Forest’.  Further east towards the Tweed valley, there are echoes of a deeper Scottish history in the border towns of Hawick, Selkirk, Galashiels, Peebles and Kelso, all on the banks of the historic River Tweed and famous for their medieval forts and abbeys.  Looking west from Broad Law to the monoculture forestry and wind-farms of 21st C Scotland This range of hills, along with the northern flanks of the Cheviot hills, marks the geographical transition to the once-contested border with Northumberland, with its high pass over Carter Bar on the A68. The more useful sense of boundaries are suggested not by the roads but by the watersheds: to the north the waters drain into the River Cly...

The boulders sit on a small wooded alp under the crag overlooking the Achray Water sliding by below, a ribbon of invisible clarity full of spring's snow-melt. It's early April in Scotland. A dipper's song rings out as it scouts downstream, a metallic squirt of noise like a kid's water-pistol. It's a religiously regular little corner of the bouldering world for me. The big beech tree beside the boulders is still in penitential winter garb, its bare limbs pale and its buds still tight-lipped whorls reluctant to sing any green matins just yet. Wild goats and their kids meander out of the forest onto the road, crossing the bridge in a slow pilgrimage, stopping traffic. I sit on the mat feeling the familiar hot-ache tingle from the cold morning rock, my tendons tuning up and vibrating in their parcels of flesh. Bouldering can feel very organic at times. Especially in solitude when you're working a problem or two: the adrenaline pump of a sudden tumble onto...

The second volume in the Scottish Mountaineering Trust's epic history of Scotting climbing - Scottish Mountaineering: Years of Change - is another essential addition to the mountaineer's bookshelf. Written by author and climber Ken Crocket, who also penned the first volume ('The Early Years'), Ken Crocket's long involvement with the SMC makes him a reliable leader in this complex territory: his attention to detail and evidence exhibits the editorial rigour these volumes require, without losing that sense of drama required for the retelling. The heady mix of legendary climbing characters who populate this volume give the narrative focus as it takes an intriguing traverse through the various clubs, 'scenes' and individuals who seemed not only to climb the best routes, but who also seemed to rope together the changing generations as Harold Raeburn and Jimmy Bell gave way to Jock Nimlin and WH Murray, who in turn passed the baton to the likes of Jimmy M...

Many volumes have been written on risk from the point of view of Economics, Evolutionary Theory, Society, etc.but risk on the hills is becoming a lot more topical with the sheer volume of people approaching mountains as something akin to 'instant freedom' from the urban world or as a monetised escape. The recent criticism of mountaineering as rich people building their CV and measures to limit ascents of Everest, for example, have brought this issue to the fore. What are our mountaineering responsibilities and rights in a 'post-exploration' world? Our author Francis Sanzaro (author of 'The Boulder'), now editor of Rock & Ice, has written an intriguing piece for the New York Times on our right to take risks in the mountains.