Book Review – Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s wild histories by Patrick Baker

This is certainly the best non-fiction book I have read this year, and one of the most captivating overall.

Baker achieves that balance between describing his own adventures and his research into their history and geography, with the result being a monument to slow travel, to instinctual and emotional responses to the passing of time, and to landscape as a record of colossal social change.

The nine chapters of the book take us on a series of journeys into areas of history and geography of the Scottish mountains which I, like expect most readers, knew nothing about.

The book will have a lasting impact on me in two ways. Firstly, to see such wildernesses in a different way from now on, what was their ‘wild history’? I want to research into that myself. Like most people, I know something of the history of wild places close to my own doorstep; The Black Dub monument up on Crosby moor, where Charles II rested with his army in 1651 when marching from Scotland following his coronation, and was turned back after bad weather, and the two standing stones and burial mound from the Iron Age just a mile or so away.

The most memorable feature of the book is Baker describing the effect on him of visiting certain places, most notably Blackwater Reservoir in Lochaber, constructed in horrific conditions by Irish navvies*, and the now deserted Clearance village of Bourbiaige on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. It is quite inspiring writing; the second lasting impact is to visit these, and other such places, myself, most likely to camp overnight and take in the atmosphere. At the cemetery at Blackwater, Baker was too affected to spend the night there himself, and departed for a refuge some miles away.

*The plight of the Irish navvies at Blackwater is described more fully in Patrick MacGill’s autobiographical novel <i>Children of the Dead End</i>, which I have just ordered, and will read soon.