What do you see when you look at our hills? Do you see a rolling, natural landscape that fills you full of joy? Do you see beauty, do you see tranquillity, a place far from the cares of our world? A place that inspires you, uplifts you and makes you dream of lonely summits and endless vistas That is what I once saw when I looked at our hills, it was those sights that drew me to our hills and filled my imagination with awe and a longing to witness them again.

Now I see something very different, now I see a landscape of ghosts from a time forgotten. I see our hills stripped bare of the forests that once thrived upon them, their wildlife desecrated and reduced to living in the margins of the land where they can seek shelter from the hand of man. This is dystopian landscape, as if destroyed by aliens, its inhabitants eking out their existence as refugees from a holocaust. I have begun to realise that, for the wildlife of our hills, we are the aliens and it is our holocaust.

For most of my climbing and walking career, some forty years, I gave little thought to what was happening to land beneath my feet. For me it was just there, it was how it had always had been. I accepted the over grazed hills of the Lake District as natural and the grouse moors I crossed on my walk up the Pennine Way as simply part of the landscape. My way of life was walking and climbing and I gave little thought to anything else as I ran down an icy Ben Nevis from the top of another climb or rambled amongst the hills of Kintail in the summer heat.

One day, on the snowy approach to another ice climb, it happened: I fell out of love with the hills and simply walked away. I put away my ice axes, hung up my crampons, and closed that chapter of my life. I had done with the hills and convinced myself I would never return. Yet I found I couldn’t quite close that door, I felt the need to say goodbye, so I wrote The Last Hillwalker, a memoir of my time in the hills.

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