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Steve Savage Publishers Ltd
CoverHighland Days

Tom Weir
sample extract

also by Tom Weir:

Weir's Way
Weir's World
isbn 9781904246305 rrp £9.50 paperback illustrated 160 pages ebook available

'Sitting writing this in a guard-tent in the blazing heat of a Belgian July I find it hard to believe that my memories are thirteen years old...

'How proud I felt after doing my first real rock-climb: a schoolboy effort on the jammed block chimney of Ben Narnain. That spring when the delights of Ben Lui and Ben More were mine and the glamour of the unknown was over every vista of jumbled peaks that opened out from the summits!...'

Written while he was in the army, Highland Days is Tom Weir's classic account of his early days climbing in Scotland -- he had climbed over 300 Munros by the time war broke out in 1939.

 

Tom Weir was born in Springburn, Glasgow in 1914. The son of a locomotive-engine fitter, he was in the first generation of working-class outdoor men and began tramping the hills near the city whenever he could escape from the grocery where he worked. In 1950 he was a member of the first postwar Himalayan expedition and in 1952 was one of the first mountaineers to explore the previously closed ranges of Nepal, east of Katmandu. His climbing took him to Greenland, Norway, Morocco and Kurdistan. Tom Weir became one of Scotland's best-known and best-loved figures. He wrote a dozen books and won the Scottish Television Personality of the Year award for his programme Weir's Way. Among other accolades he received the MBE and was the first recipient of the John Muir Trust Lifetime Achievement Award 'in recognition of his contribution to the wider understanding of wild places'. Tom Weir died in 2006.

'Classic autobiographical account of Weir's time spent in Scotland's hills ... Written as Weir was serving in the Second World War, his recollections are undoubtedly infused with an element of nostalgia for the peaceful naivety of his formative years, but this only enhances the passion with which he writes about the delights of scrambling through the hills.'
-- Rob Fletcher, Scottish Field

'Among the top rank of Scottish outdoor gurus ... His is a quiet authority earned by a lifetime tramping across Scotland and around a lot of the wilder and higher parts of the world'
-- The Herald

'Tom writes vividly of what happened. He deals in a rush of words about something which happened to him; which he had fiercely dreamed of doing -- exploring mountain country'
-- Professor Sir Robert Grieve