The Joy Of Planning

Your mountain expert revisits a favourite book that opened up Scotland for him and kindled a heady delight in plotting a route

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IT was a slim paperback and originally published in 1947. My copy was a second edition from 1975 and I treasured it as one would treasure a Rembrandt.

It had the somewhat prosaic title of Scottish Hill Tracks: Old Highways And Drove Roads, and it came in two parts - South Scotland and North Scotland.

The author was Donald Moir of the Scottish Rights of Way Society and, along with a copy of Munros Tables, his work became my hill-going bible.

I never actually met the author, although our paths must have crossed several times. Donald Grant Moir died in 1986 aged 84 and originally came from Banchory. He had served as honorary secretary of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), an esteemed organisation I worked for during the 1970s and early 80s. He was also secretary to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, which I have strong links to, so I feel I should really have known him, and not just on a reader/author basis.

Donald Moir's real claim to fame, although I'm sure he'd never have referred to it as that, was his work with the Scottish Rights of Way Society, nowadays known as ScotWays. He served as a director of the charity and was the creator of those wee books first published in 1947. They built upon the work of Walter Smith's Hill Paths In Scotland: The Hill Paths, Drove Roads And Cross Country Routes In Scotland, From The Cheviots To Sutherland first published in 1924. The sixth edition of Moir's book has recently been published, and it's a very different beast from the original little paperbacks.