From the Solway Firth in the south to Shetland in the north, from remote St Kilda to the west to St Abbs in the east, Tom Weir explores Scotland as a walker and climber -- introduces his readers to the range of wildlife and people living in the countryside, and historical aspects of various places. To his vivid descriptive writing he adds memories of some absent friends, and also retraces the path of Bonnie Prince Charlie on the run after Culloden.

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.

'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

'An engaging style, celebrating easily, without overwriting, the pleasures of the countryside; the play of light, the birds and animals, the flowers, unique features and the traces of the past'
-- The Scotsman