Search results for ""Author Patrick Baker""

Shortlisted for the The Great Outdoors Awards – Outdoor Book of the Year 2020 Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020 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 post-industrial 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.

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Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill’s first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven –an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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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.

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