Book Notes: The Joy of Hillwalking by Ralph Storer

There should be more hillwalking books like this! I have, over several years, picked up quite a few books on walking, from Poucher, Butterfield, McNeish to the standard SMC guides. Most of these are route guides, suggesting everything from campsites, to car park to lines of ascent. These have proved to be very useful over the years, and comparing and contrasting the different options offered has been fun. The SMC are the most cautious and least ambitious route-makers, McNeish in the middle and Butterfield at the other extreme. At times it seems that it is not possible to have two mountains within 30 miles of each other without him wanting to link them together into one monstrous outing!

However, before even starting I have digressed - for "The Joy of Hillwalking" is not a route-guide type of book at all. It is rather, a book which humorously reflects on the whole business of hillwalking, climbing, camping - and many aspects of life in the great outdoors.

Storer is, of course, no stranger to writing moutain guides (with dull titles like "50 more routes on Scottish Hills), but this book is his reflections on decades worth of climbs done in mountain ranges all around the world. In it we find out how much he despises the sport of bagging, his love of wind, rain, scrambles and snow, and countless hilarious scrapes he has got into on various expeditions. Not a few of which are entirely unsuitable for a junior audience. He regales the reader with tales of falls, injuries, navigational blunders, other walkers foibles, camping disasters, and flaming tents! Alongside this, he describes engagingly the wonderful sense of isolation in the hills and the love and respect for the mountains it engenders.

Storer seems to have spent every weekend and holiday in the hills, and apart from a job seems to have no ties, attachments or responsibilities to get in the way of his outdoor pursuits. If he did, perhaps he'd be a little more sympathetic to those of us for whom a Saturday Munroing is a treat, and a month-long cross-country expedition an impossibility.

Hill walking books which evoke the sheer joy of the whole thing are few and far between - and this is on occasion laugh-out-loud funny - especially if the blunder in questions in one in which you can vividly recall yourself! The only other book of this type I've come accross is "Mountain Days and Bothy Nights" - a really entertaining book on bothying in Scotland.