I had an email yesterday from Robert who is pretty eagle eyed. He has realised that I often review books on Amazon as well as here on the blog. The Amazon listing covers a wider range of contributions.

Amazon list me as one of their top 500 reviews which — rather nicely — is based on whether the readers feel the reviews are useful or not!

For Robert and everyone else, you can find all of my review at:

My Amazon book reviews

A real gem of a book this. Jan Morris works on those chance encounters and experiences that all of us when we travel. But with her keen eye, life of travel and journalistic experience she transforms these into something very special indeed.

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Most UK — and European — Travel writers tend to look to the West, the East or the South for their inspiration. They search for the truly exotic in a kind of Greek sense. Think of some of the greats, Robert Byron in Oxonia (Afghanistan), Chatwin in Patagonia or the Aussie outback or Leigh Fermor on the Greek Islands. Not many people write about the Arctic, one of the areas that fascinates me the most. Joanna Kavenna did a great job in searching for the last land of Thule The Ice Museum but that’s about it. This book, though, is an absolute delight. I’ve not heard about Scottish writer Francis before — and Amazon seems to suggest this is his first book (at least his first major publishing deal — but trust me, this man is a star of the future.

Francis got the idea for this book while doing aid working in the tropics. He worked with an Icelandic woman who confessed that she loved her work and the tropics but couldn’t bear to be out of Iceland for too long. She has constructed her life so that she spends half of the year in Iceland and half in warmer climates. Francis began to spend more and more time thinking about the arctic and this book is the result.

For True North Francis set out on a journey to explore the lands of the European Arctic, to learn about their history and to encounter both their indigenous people and those who for some reason or another have chosen to live there. The journey begins in the Shetlands (not Scotland you know) and moves on to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, finishing up in Lapland. I think I’ve missed somewhere, but never mind …

Francis tells the story of each place with care and affection. Ancient history and stories of exploration and discovery are often found in (or triangulated with) the Norse Sagas. The Sagas tell of the Irish, Viking and English ancient explorers that first visited these lands — those seeking new discovers, others seeking to take forward religious messages, some looking for wealth and others seeking sanctuary or simply keeping their heads down. More recent history sees the great European trading powers seeking new routes through the North West passage and so on.

In each place people and communities are given pride of place. Of course there are the ancient communities, the Inuit and the Sammis for example, but there are all manner of settlers and visitors. Many of these places have colonial pasts — or colonnial presents — and Francis gives voice to those who are now beginning to be be proud of their unique identities.

There’s also the natural world, explored mainly on foot as Francis and his tent explore the wonders of Arctic Fjords, volcanic landscapes and seek to avoid the dangers of the polar bears. But this is no adventure book but a lovely, lingering, account of a world which exists within its own set of rules and is firmly routed in its own setting.

It may easy to ignore the Arctic but it is of course so important to us all and we realise this, not least, through the dramatic changes that are happening there through global warming and that are effecting us all as well.

I really, really, enjoyed this book. If wild, cold, tundra wildernesses get you going — well don’t miss it.

Francis is a writer to watch.

Gavin Francis’ Website

Eighteen months or so ago saw me travelling back from the Cairngorms to Birmingham by train. I stopped in Borders in Glasgow to pick a book to accompany me back to New Street. I came out with a copy of a simply wonderful book, “Calum’s Road” by Roger Hutchinson. Calum’s Road was the story of one man’s quest to connect his isolated settlement in the north of Rossay with the road system in the south. But the book was much more than that. It was a fine history of a small island community in the Hebrides covering the islanders battle with absentee landlords and their struggle to eek out a living from this bleak land. I reviewed Calum’s Road here.

Last week I was back in the same branch of borders after another trip to the Cairngorms. I was delighted to find a new book from Hutchinson, “Walking to America”. I snapped it up and finished it in one sitting on the train journey to Birmingham.

“Walking to America” is about Hutchinson’s own family. As a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s Hutchinson spent time at his grandfather’s cottage in Country Durham. His grandfather had worked all his life down the pit and spent his retirement locked inside the house as if — even in retirement — his battered body could no longer stand the outdoors and natural sunlight. His grandfather and one big thing going for him; he had a television at a time when Hutchinson’s parents did not.

His grandfather was a man of few words, but one day, while watching a cowboy TV programme he jumped up and announced “I used to live there”. And so a young boy became fascinated with the knowledge that his family had travelled to the States but had then returned back to the pits of Durham.

This book tells the story of not only Hutchinson’s family but of many others who made their way from the coalfields to the USA. Today, we are all aware of the many Irish and Scots who emigrated but what is not so well known is that one of the largest groups of immigrants to the US, during the later part of the 1800s, were the English.

This is a fascinating if not ultimately sad story. Almost a whole generation of one extended family made their way over the Atlantic to Pittsburg via. Philadelphia, driven on of course by dreams of a new life and the hope of finding a cure for one of the group’s blindness. Pittsburg at that time was described as the blackest and dirtiest city in the world. But the family did not stop in Pittsburg.

One sister in the group was married to an Irishman who upped sticks and took his family south to join the Irish community in New Orleans. But something happened and before long the family — minus the sister — was back in England. Those that had remained in Pittsburg then travelled south on the hopeless mission of finding out what had happened to their missing sister. While they never found her these Durham miners found themselves in a world of the deep south, amongst the Spanish and latino cultures and the African slaves of the deep south. After abandoning their search the family moved back North. But this was not the end of their travels and before long they were taking the long journey to the promised land of the west.

The family ended up in Arizona trying to make a living from the extraction of minerals from the petrified forest. They made their home in Holbrook which was very much a frontier town with native American communities that had only fought their last battles a year or two beforehand. There are shootouts and other scenes direct from the Westerns. A family tragedy — the death of a young daughter — led to the family giving up their dream and returning to the English coalfields.

“Walking to America” is a fascinating story and one which is much more than just the experience of one family. Hutchinson brings alive the dreams of the immigrants, the harshness of their life and the bravery of their journeys.

Hutchinson writes with the most sympathetic of styles. There is no over cleverness here to over shadow the story. Yet there is plenty of details and historical reference. It is one of Hutchinson’s skills to weave all of this together in a narrative that is fascinating and quite effortless to read.

This is well worth seeking out. Available only in hardback at the moment, but the book itself is a lovely thing and will give real pleasure to those who still like the feel of real paper.

“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless”.

Walter Benjamin

“Every person I knew who was saved during the war was saved solely by the grace of someone who, at a time of great danger, extended a hand to him. It was no God that we saw in the camps, but good people. The old Jewish saying that the world continues to exist only by the virtue of a few righteous people is as true today as it was back then.

Aaron Applefield, The Story of a Life

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This is a book that will be of immediate interest to TGO Challenger, not least as they are always wanting options for those years when their applications for the event are not successful. The Cape Wrath Trail — from Fort William to Sandwood Bay — is a popular alternative; I suspect the Sutherland Trail is going to be joining it. And regardless of the Challenge or not this is a trail that many walkers and backpackers are going to appreciate.

The Sutherland Trail as laid down in this book begins at Lochinver north of Ullapool on the west coast of Scotland and winds its way in a north easterly direction to Tongue on the north coast. While the route is well documented this is no simple guide book. It is a tie-in to the BBC documentary that the pair produced on Sutherland — Sutherland — The Empty Lands?. I’m not sure whether this was ever shown south of the border but don’t let the TV connection put you off though because what we have ended up is a thoroughly satisfying book.

The TV programme featured not only on the walk but on the people who still live, farm and work in this scarcely inhabited piece of Britain. Much of this content illuminates the book.

As preparation for the programme Cameron and his wife Gina walked the whole length of the trail and this was covered in a recent edition of TGO magazine. It is to Cameron’s lasting credit that he realised that the best preparation for the programme was to walk across the land, taking everything in at the most natural of paces. Places and people were then revisited by both Cameron and Richard who’s superb photographs feature throughout, often with a TV crew in toe.

What we end up with is a far richer piece of work than you would usually expect for something that covers a walking and backpacking trail. We learn a great deal about the geology and natural history of the place, of the Torridonian rocks of the west that are almost 3,000,000 yeas old and of the changing landscapes as we move over the watershed from the lands of Sutherland to Caithness. The watershed formed the barrier for two ancient civilisations. To the west was the language and culture of the islands and the east that of the Orcadians — I think I’ve got that right!

To the natural history Cameron adds the more recent social history of the area which to a large extent has been dominated by the clearances set in motion by the Sutherland estate which valued the sheep more than human inhabitants. Some of residents of these lands were moved on to strips of lower land on the coast, while others were piled on to boats and shipped out to North America. Like cameron I have often fund this cleared areas to be very moving, There is often a lonely sense of sadness that prevails the land with its abandoned farming communities. Sutherland is now often referred to as the empty lands but once this was a far more populous place. But Cameron doesn’t just document history. Today he finds that there is a new vibrancy to the land with new families and communities seeking to build a new life away from urban Britain. And established communities are beginning to take control of their own destinies by using the Land reform Scotland Act of 2003 to purchase their land. The Assynt Foundation was the first to make use of this new legislation and become the inspiration for those that followed, for example the Knoydart Foundation. It looks as if this area has a bright future in front of it.

So, there is a lot more here than a description of a trail but there is not too much information. This is a book about the land and its communities and not a history book. What is here will enhance the walking of the trail and maybe prompt you to do someone research when you return.

But what of the trail?

Cameron and Gina spent six nights on the trail, three spent in hotels of guest houses and three camping out in the wild. They could have spent every night in real comfort or every night camping wild. Their’s was a low route tat took a week but you could easily extend this by taking in the surrounding mountains and probably stretching this for the best part of a fortnight.

In the book Cameron takes in the mountains sometimes relying on recent visits and on other times drawing on a life’s exploration of these hills. We have an exploration of Munros, Corbetts and Grahams — although I quickly moved on at this point in case I became infected with this bagger thing! But we have essays on the great Suilven, Quinnag, Ben Stack, Foinaven , Ben Hope and much more. And then there are the stories of lonely bothies, of bogs and the creation of the land distance paths and hill tracks.

You can see that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the Sutherland Trail is now added to my list of trail to walk one day. But there is another journey detailed here which adds to the spirit of the walk.

A couple of years ago I was chatting to Cameron at some show or another. He told me that he thought he should step down from the editorship of TGO sometime around the age of 60. It was simply not right to carry on editing a hill walking magazine at this age. Besides, there were lots of other things that he wanted to do, lots of other projects that he wanted to tackle. I guess The Sutherland Trail is one of these and the Mountain Media company that publishes it another. You get a sense of Cameron beginning to embark on another personal journey and in this book you can see so many other things as well. There was the realisation that the encounters with the people he had met for the programme has greatly enhanced the experience of walking in the area, this from a man who confesses he usually likes nothing better to be walking in solitude. I’m the same really but the people of places and the camaraderie of the trail is something that I’m just only now really beginning to appreciate. And then there’s Cameron conquering a life long suspicion of seafood and finally realising what he has been missing. Oh, and if you like a bit of comfort with your walking there are some great descriptions of meals taken and hotels stayed in!

Thoroughly recommended!

www.mountain-media.co.uk

Oooh, this is a great book. If you like maps that is.

Mike Parker is a self-confessed map addict. As a child he dedicated his life to acquiring a complete set of the OS 1:50,000 Landranger series maps. When his pocket money suggested it would take a long time to complete the set he simply resorted to shoplifting.

This is a book about an obsession, but it is a very fine book nonetheless. It is quirky, often very funny, cheeky and very informative as well. There’s a really good section on the birth and development of Ordnance Survey, the best producers of maps in the world according to Parker. There’s a great chapter on borders and border country, focussing (for example) on those strange little states where the border runs down the high street or through the middle of the bar. There’s the importance of maps in history and the importance of maps to history. Many modern county boundaries — and sometimes national boundaries —a tidy and ordered, precisely because they have been created by studying maps.

Maps have always been associated with political power, and there’s a very good chapter here about the real purposes of some early maps, taking in England’s Catholic insurgents, the Papacy and so on. From power Parker logically moves on to religion and how that has shaped maps.

The chapter, Carto Erotica, considers the naughty bits of maps. There are the obvious ones like the Cerne man in Dorset — just how big should his penis be when represented on the OS Map? And then there are the place names, the Piddles, Bottoms and so on. Maps also reveal the way we have become more prudish — many medieval towns had streets called Gropecunt Lane, for example. Most commonly these have now become Grove Lanes. Spare a thought though for the poor residents of the Austrian Village of Fucking. Austrian tourism chiefs have realised that different nationalities like to visit different places in their country and are fascinated by different aspects of it. Fucking is the favourite of the English who love nothing better than returning home with a knicked village sign!

And then there are the big issues? Is it true that women can’t read maps? I’ll leave this one for you to judge. Of course, the book looks at the humble satnav which Parker simply hates, although he recognises the power and importance of computer mapping with its ability to overlay many different types of information.

I’m deliberately not focussing on detail and content because I don’t want to spoil it.

I assume that many of you who read this blog love maps as much as I do. Of course you do for you’re hill walkers. You are also probably, in the main, male. You will love the quirky and the eccentric. You will probably like collecting things and will be the kind of person who revels in useless facts and information. And there’s a lot of that here.

Map Addicts looks at all kinds of fascinating things. How does the OS use errors and details as kind of map signatures through which they can spot the unlicensed use of their material? What about the old cold war policy of simply not sketching out military installations? Rather wonderfully I thought, map lovers (and presumably the Ruskies) could work out where the top secret places were but simply looking for gaps on the maps! How about the grid design of Milton Keynes, designed to align with the path of the sun during the summer solstice! What about the battle between the OS and tourism chiefs who want every little thing listed on maps with their own little symbols. And then there was the british board of censors trying to decide when a penis was too erect to show on screen. The ideal — acceptable penis — is the same angle as is Kintyre to Arran. Brilliant. Just the kind of mappish devotion you would expect from Brit censors. And what about the current craze for making maps based on your life’s sexual history? I kid you not, there are people that do that kind of thing. Rather weirdly the author contemplates his own sexual history and reckons that much of it can be placed on just one page on one A to Z — the same one in which I live (Birmingham, Moseley and Balsall Heath if you must know)

Where is the the square mile that the OS reckons to be the most boring square mile of land in the UK? Which OS map has the most green sea on it? Which maps has the least contours. Who picked maps as their desert Island books? Oh yes, there’s a lot of really vital stuff to learn here, not to mention the usual stuff about disappearing counties and county boundaries — there’s a wonderful cameo appearance from Rutland.

Rather engagingly, this is also the story of one maps obsession with mapping and the personal story — how the obsession grew as he did — is a lovely read in itself. How many others here grew up on the books of Malcolm Saville, with those great maps on the inner cover?

We Brits are the best map maker in the world. We had to work at it mind. We used to be crap and we had to work hard to beat those frenchies at their own game andof course ultimately we prevailed (with the help of the yanks) is securing the Greenwich Meridian, the centre of all world map making. The real centre of map making is probably Southampton though, where the OS is based. Above all else this is a Brit book — where else could you find a list of the 10 best Landranger Maps and one of the 10 worst Landrangers?

I hadn’t quite realised the nature of some people’s obsessions with maps. There are clubs and societies, internet chat rooms and, of course a thriving market in old and antiquarian maps. It is a typical British obsession, a bit like steam trains and the train timetable. It’s all here, this weird world, in Map Addict.

I’m writing this on a train back home to Brum. The first thing I will do when I get in is to have a good old look at my maps, handle and caress them.

If you sometimes feel the same way, then this is a book you can’t miss!

Just discovered this. I’ve not read it yet but it looks the kind of thing that will get a lot of you folks going. Something to read in Ireland I guess.

A couple of emails have asked for recommendations for the summer. Here are some goodies you may have missed; all are available by paperback

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris

Jan Morris is one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers. These days Morris has retired to her house in North Wales and although still writing Trieste was her last travel book. Trieste was deliberately chosen as the scene for her last travel book. Morris first came here as a soldier in 1945

“It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that anyone knows.”

Yet Trieste is one of Morris’ favourite cities a place that has constantly changed ownership over the centuries. This place has been a haven for writers, James Joyce included. Morris describes how Joyce and wife turned up, Joyce leaving her at the station to look for accommodation but getting side tracked by a came of cards (I think). It is that kind of place.

European history at its best. This is a stupendous book. If you’ve not read Morris before the treat yourself!

Colin Thubron

For my money Thubron is be best travel writer of his generation, and the best one alive who is still traveling and writing. In recent years he has specialised in out of the way places in Asia such as China, Siberia and many of the Muslim states that were once part of the Soviet Republic.

In his younger days Thubron was more of a hiker and wild camper, well some of the time. Many of the journeys he undertook then — particularly in the Middle East — are now impossible. As such these books are not only remarkable but a reminder of how much diplomacy has failed us!

Try any of these:

The Hills of Adonis: A Journey in Lebanon

Jerusalem

Journey into Cyprus

Mirror to Damascus

Patrick Leigh Femor — the Great Walk

Leigh Fermor is one of the greatest English stylists writing today. He is rightly revered as a travel writer for a series of books published after World War II. Fermor is also a great linguist and spent the war working behind enemy lines in Greece.

Just prior to WWII, as a very young man, Leigh Fermor set out to walk from home to Constantinople, across Europe as the Nazis were preparing for war.

Leigh Fermor only began to write up this account many years later and partially as a result we have the most stunning books, wonderfully scholarly, beautiful to read. And they’re great stories.

If you fancy yourself as a long distant walker you must read these. I reckon these are two of the best books I have ever read from any genre.

A Time of Gifts — the first volume from the Hook of holland to the Middle Danube.

Between the Woods and the Water, The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates.

There is a third volume to come. Leigh Fermor’s diaries were left behind in Rumania as he had to flee the Germans and he never thought he would find them again. After the Berlin Wall fell the Telegraph flew him out to Rumania, he found the house and was astonished to find that the family had cared for his diaries like treasure, just in case he ever came back.

Leigh Fermor fans are desperate for the third volume to be finished, quite honestly before he dies. I hope he does though I’ve not heard any mention of it for a while. still, if all we have are these two volumes it is a great achievement.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit

I reviewed this some time ago on Amazon:

This book is rather humbly subtitled a history of walking. But it is much more than that, this is a wonderful work of philosophy, imagination and wonder.
A history this book is rich and wide ranging. Yes we do get an almost Chatwin-esque detail of how walking has entered the western consciousness, but we also gain some wonderful insights into both the society of yesterday and today.

Consider just one little fragment: the significance of womens’ love of shopping! Apparently, walking to the shops was virtually the only activity which Victorian society felt it appropriate that allowed women to venture out of the home on their own. So ‘doing shopping’ is about liberation, about revolution and gentle rebellion. Radical walking is certainly a feature of this book.

For me, there is nothing like walking hiking or treking. As Chatwin used to suggest, it is the most natural means of movement and transport. Even Bruce Chatwin at his most fantastical would have been astonished by the scope of this book.

Since Wanderlust’s publication I have bought this for several walkers and the first thing they have done after finishing it is to have bought another copy for a friend. If you are a walker then this is an essential text.

But just because this is about walking doesn’t mean that this is somehow boring or of a certain nice. Consider some of the Chapter headings. yes they include titles like ‘The Legs of William Wordsworth’ and ‘Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars’. But here there is also ‘Paris, or Botanizing on the Ashphalt’, ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’, ‘Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex and Public Space’ and, lastly, ‘Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points’.

This is unique. It is fascinating, authoritative, quirky and entertaining.

If you like walking, over mountains or just strolling after lunch, than this is a book for you. Truly original.