Patrick Baker talks about exploring the lesser known parts of our hills, exploring their secrets and discovering the histories hidden within them.
Patrick Baker worked in the publishing industry for many years and is currently a commercial writer and content producer. A keen outdoor enthusiast, he has walked and climbed throughout Scotland and Europe. His hillwalk ing guidebook Walking in the Ochils, Campsie Fells and Lomond Hills was published in 2006, and he is also the author of The Cairngorms: A Secret History (Birlinn, 2014), and The Unremembered Places (Birlinn, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker prize for Mountain Literature. Follow him on Twitter @WildHistorian1.
The Cairngorms: A Secret History is a series of journeys exploring barely known human and natural stories of the Cairngorm Mountains. It looks at a unique British landscape, its last great wilderness, with new eyes. History combines with travelogue in a vivid account of this elemental scenery. There have been rare human incursions into the Cairngorm plateau, and Patrick Baker tracks them down. He traces elusive wildlife and relives ghostly sightings on the summit of Ben Macdui. From the search for a long-forgotten climbing shelter and the locating of ancient gem mines, to the discovery of skeletal aircraft remains and the hunt for a mysterious nineteenth-century aristocratic settlement, he seeks out the unlikeliest and most interesting of features in places far off the beaten track. The cultural and human impact of this stunning landscape and reflections on the history of mountaineering are the threads which bind this compelling narrative together.
There are strange relics hidden across Scotland’s landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are so many of these ‘wild histories’ unnoticed and overlooked? And what can they tell us about our own modern identity?
From the high mountain passes of an ancient droving route to a desolate moorland graveyard, from uninhabited postindustrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries, Patrick Baker makes a series of journeys on foot and by paddle. Along the way, he encounters Neolithic settlements, bizarre World War Two structures, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds.
Combining a rich fusion of travelogue and historical narrative, he threads themes of geology, natural and social history, literature, and industry from the places he visits, discovering connections between people and place more powerful than can be imagined.
