Sandstone Press

Review of Hamish’s Mountain Walk by Sarah McKenna of ReaderIReadIt

Posted by RLD on 13th August 2010

This delightful review of our re-imagined edition of Hamish Brown’s classic Hamish’s Mountain Walk is by Sarah McKenna. For this and more please visit http://www.readerireadit.com

HAMISH’S MOUNTAIN WALK

After packing in his job, Hamish Brown, decided to devote the rest of his life to what he liked best; walking and climbing in the mountains. The resulting diary of his first ‘expedition’ became a book that over the years has become the Scottish hill-walkers ‘Bible’ and like the Bible includes a Ten Commandments of Mountaineering.. First published in 1978 Hamish’s Mountain Walk has recently been republished by Sandstone Press Ltd.

This book is essential reading for both the armchair mountaineer and the genuine article. The armchair variety can relax with a bottle of malt and walk with Hamish in total safety. The practical mountain man or woman will do well to take heed and remember all of the advice contained within the pages.

Brown took on the challenge to tackle every Munro in Scotland in one go, travelling by bicycle to each one, only using ferries on a couple of occasions to get to the islands. For the uninitiated, ‘Munros’ refer to mountains over 3,000 feet and named after Sir Hugh Munro who published Tables of Heights over 3,000 feet in 1891. (Smaller mountains over 2,500 feet are known as Corbetts and named after J.R. Corbett, not after the comedian Ronnie Corbett, in case you were wondering. A veritable fount of knowledge is this book.)

The entire journey is written in fine detail including logistics, weather and of course midges. Anybody wanting to follow in his footsteps will find everything here to prepare them for the journey. If they just want to tackle individual mountains as the fancy takes them then all the information is here accompanied by detailed maps of the area and supplemented with quite dramatic photographs of the mountains themselves.

It must not be thought that this book is merely a technical tome for the mountaineering ‘mechanic’. It is rather like a mixture of a Wainwright and the travel writer H.V. Morton with a wealth of background information for every step of the way. The literary and historical references which abound bring the mountains and surrounding countryside to life. There are too many to mention in a short space like this but it is easy to imagine the various tragedies that happened at each location, ranging from bloody feuds to the disgraceful ‘Clearances’ which led to the depopulation of the highlands.

In short, Hamish’s Mountain Walk is one of those books that anybody interested in the ‘great outdoors’ must read. It goes far beyond being a practical manual, which it is and a good one at that. It is a genuine work of literature from an expert writer driven by a single passion in life and can be counted as one of the best of its kind. Add it to your library and take a walk with Hamish, you won’t regret it.

Now, where’s that bottle of malt ….