Reading Scotland
Read and Recommended
Norman MacCaig
MacCaig rejected complex, high-brow academic language in favour of striking visual accuracy and profound everyday accessibility. While most romantic poets projected their own human feelings onto nature, MacCaig did the opposite. Seeing that a mountain like Suilven or a bird on a loch does not care about human presence—forcing the human ego to step back.
Kat Hill
Bothys are that rare thing from the past that hasn’t changed–remote huts in the wilderness whose doors are always unlocked. Kat Hill explores the history of these wild shelters and her fellow wanderers – past and present.
Nan Shepherd
An extraordinary book written in 1944 about Nan Shepherd’s experiences in the Cairngorm Mountains. Each time I read it, like Shepherd's landscape, I afind something new: "However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them."
Amy Liptrot
At the age of thirty, Amy Liptrot finds herself washed up back home on Orkney. She swims in the bracingly cold sea and tracks wildlife as she tries to come to terms with the addiction that has swallowed the last decade of her life. A powerful read on how the wild can restore life and renew hope.
Ken Smith
Ken Smith spent four decades in the Scottish Highlands, living alone in a cabin near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch'. While this is a ghostwritten memoir, it draws from Ken’s meticulously kept personal diaries. A refreshing account from somebody who lived in the wilderness and is not a polished writer.
Alistair Moffat
Through 12 walks, Alistair Moffat traverses the lost paths of Scotland that shaped and were shaped by the lives of the people who trod them. Moffat charts a powerful, surprising and moving history of Scotland: a great read.
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