Episodes

  • Jen Scotney: Running Through the Dark | Podcast

    Jen Scotney: Running Through the Dark | Podcast
    Aug 27 2024
    John D. Burns talks to ultra runner Jen Scotney about the solace she found in running and how she has coped with the health challenges she has faced that have left her without the sport she loved. Running Through the Dark is a deeply personal book which faces the challenges of bereavement, chronic fatigue and facing up to losing a life long passion. Jen Scotney boasts an impressive record as an ultrarunner with podium finishes in the 108-mile Montane Winter Spine Challenger South and the 190-mile Northern Traverse. She is host of the Resilience Rising Podcast, a coach, writer, Mountain Leader and yoga teacher, which have followed her career as a human rights lawyer. Jen Scotney She has appeared in magazine features for Runner’s World, Trail Running and Women’s Running. She has been a guest host on the Wild Ginger Running YouTube channel, and a guest on the Tough Girl Podcast. She crewed for John Kelly’s successful Pennine Way fastest known time as well as for his Wainwrights Round in the Lake District. She grew up in the Peak District and now lives in the Scottish mountains with her husband Marcus and Sherlock the beagle. She is a trainee member of Killin Mountain Rescue Team. Running Through the Dark is her first book.
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  • Kev Mitchell: Scottish Mountain Rescue | Podcast

    Kev Mitchell: Scottish Mountain Rescue | Podcast
    Aug 17 2024
    Kev Mitchell talks about the vital work of Scottish Mountain Rescue.
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  • Henry Iddon & Max Leonard: Mountain Style | Podcast

    Henry Iddon & Max Leonard: Mountain Style | Podcast
    Aug 5 2024
    Everyone who explores the outdoors has a special relationship with their clothing. A cagoule can keep you safe in a storm, a duvet jacket might keep you warm through a freezing night, or a pair of gloves may save your hands from the numbing cold. In their new book, Mountain Style, Henry Iddon And Max Leonard are taking a look back over the years to the birth of outdoor equipment. in this podcast I'll be chatting to them about how the birth of specialist mountain clothing in the UK charts not only the growth of the outdoor industry but also a socail history of rising social mobility. When George Mallory made his fateful attempt on Everest in 1922 he was wearing was a high-tech windproof gabardine material, cut as a traditional Norfolk jacket style. Hi partner Sandy Irvine had fitted new-fangled zippers on to his clothing, to help with doing it up at altitude but that was all the specialist equipment the pair had. Until the 1950s most hill goers wore adapted street clothes and were wet and uncomfortable in all but the most benign mountain weather. Then things began to change. In Mountain Style, Max and Henry chart the rise of the out door industry and the growth of clothing designed for use in the outdoors as climbing and hillwalking boomed in the UK, creating a demand for functional, rugged clothing that could cope with the mountain environment. Henry Iddon Max Leonard For my generation of outdoor folk most of our kit came from Army Surplus stores. My first pair of winter walking trousers were my uncle's RAF trousers. They were wool, incredibly warm and comfortable. There's something reassuring in knowing your trousers played their part in the downfall of Hitler. For decades the image of a hillwalker in the public imagination was of someone in a bobble hat. That was probably because Tom Weir was the only walker most people saw on TV and he was never with out his woollen bonnet. Berghaus advertFootloose issue 27 July 1985 The story of the development of outdoor clothing is a social history. In the early years mountaineering was the reserve of a small number of people who had the leisure time and the funds to be able to travel to the mountains. Specialist outdoor gear began by a small number of elite climbers combining the technology from North sea oil and the sailing community to make the clothing they needed Over the years working class folk became more affluent and outdoor clothing attracted big manufacturers and entered the mass market. Then, being practical and comfortable, it made its way to the man in the street who had no intention of going near a hill but wanted something that would keep him dry. I know I'm getting old because my early mountain kit is now preserved in a museum. Mountain Style is available to pre-order now and will fascinate everyone with an interest in the history of outdoor pursuits whilst many old codgers like me will delight in in finding something and saying. "I had one of those!"
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  • Kat Hill: Bothy | Podcast

    Kat Hill: Bothy | Podcast
    Jul 3 2024
    John D. Burns talks to Kat Hill about her new book, Bothy, and her delight in these remote shelters. The pace at which our lives become increasingly complex seems to constantly accelerate. The computers, phones and artificial intelligence that we have created to release us from mundane chores seem, in fact, to have enslaved us. Who can resist constantly checking the phone to catch the latest trend and social media? Once we could escape the world by merely walking away from a phone that was attached to a wall. At one time there was a place where work, and even the cares of the world, could not reach us. Sadly, it seems that this time has passed and no matter where we are the electric machine clamours for our attention. Perhaps it is for this reason that the simple shelters scattered across the Highlands, known as bothies, have an increasing attraction. Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland, and her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford (2011), where she was also a British Academy Postdoctoral Award holder. Most recently she held an Environmental Humanities fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and completed an MA in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa. She is a Fellow at the IAS, Princeton University for 2024-25. Kat lectured at Oxford, UEA and Birkbeck College for ten years before leaving academia and London for a life in Scotland to write. She currently works as a Community Engagement Coordinator for Highlands Rewilding and offers bespoke 1-2-1 tutoring. She is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and a European champion. Travelling to bothies around the UK, this book reveals the history of these wild mountain shelters and the people who visit them. With a historian’s insight and a rambler’s imagination, she lends fresh consideration to the concepts of nature, wilderness and escape. All the while, Kat weaves together her story of new purpose with those of her fellow wanderers, past and present. She moves from a hut in an active military training area in the far-north of Scotland to a fairy-tale cottage in Wales. Along her travels, she explores the conflict between our desire to preserve isolated beauty and the urge to share it with others – embodied by the humble bothy. To order your copy lick HERE Gelder Sheil Bothy These are just a few of the Bothies you can find in the Highlands of Scotland. They are maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association which relies on donations to carry out its work. Donate to the MBA HERE You can read stories about my travels to remote Bothies in my best selling book, Bothy Tales. I'm writing Bothy Tales II right now. Available in the Autumn. Buy Bothy Tales HERE
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  • Chris Townsend: A Cairngorm Conversation | Podcast

    Chris Townsend: A Cairngorm Conversation | Podcast
    Jun 13 2024
    Author and photographer, Chris Townsend, talks about the future of the Cairngorms.
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  • Mick Conefrey: Fallen – George Mallory | Podcast

    Mick Conefrey: Fallen – George Mallory | Podcast
    May 2 2024
    It is almost 100 years since climbers, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, vanished into the clouds high on Mount Everest and were never seen alive again. Their disappearance sparked the greatest mystery in mountaineering. We will never know if they reached the summit and exactly what caused their fateful accident. Listen to Mick talking about his new book, Fallen, Mick Coneferey, as he tells his intriguing version of the story. Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He made the landmark BBC series Mountain Men, Icemen and The Race for Everest to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include Everest 1922, Everest 1953, the winner of a LeggiMontagna award, The Last Great Mountain, the winner of the Premio Itas in 2023, and The Ghosts of K2, which won a US National Outdoor Book award in 2017. George Mallory In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionised in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge. Handsome, charismatic, daring, he was a skilled public speaker, an athletic and technically gifted climber, a committed Socialist and a supremely attractive figure to both men and women. His friends ranged from the gay artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group to the best mountaineers of his era. But that was only one side to him. Mallory was also a risk taker who according to his friend and biographer David Pye, could never get behind the wheel of a car without overtaking the vehicle in front, a climber who pushed himself and those around him to the limits, a chaotic technophobe who was forever losing equipment or mishandling it, the man who led his porters to their deaths in 1922 and his young partner to his uncertain end in 1924. George Mallory and Sandy Irvine So who was the real Mallory and what were the forces that made him and ultimately destroyed him? Why did the man who denounced oxygen sets as 'damnable heresy' in 1922 perish on an oxygen-powered summit attempt two years later? And above all, what made him go back to Everest for the third time? Based on diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, Fallen is both a forensic account of Mallory's last expedition to Everest in 1924 and an attempt to get under his skin and separate the man from the myth.
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  • John McLellan: Unconformity | Podcast

    John McLellan: Unconformity | Podcast
    Apr 26 2024
    Listen to John McLellan talking about his new novel, Unconformity. In his second novel, John McLellan continues his love affair with the wild landscape of the Highlands. A geologist at heart, John's books combine his deep understanding of the bones beneath the landscape with his sensitivity to its influence on the human heart. Get your copy HERE ‘Unconformity’ is a standalone novel, but readers of his debut novel ‘The Faultline’ will also enjoy some continuation of the characters and their journey. Set over four summers, initially in The Alps and then across the North West Highlands, we see the inner turmoil of the characters unfold. Life will change for some of them, as they head off on a different and unprecedented path. The novel is about friendships, affection and love, with a continual background of mountains and rocks. We discover the significance of a geological unconformity, not just as an important historical discovery but also as a metaphor for understanding a life. The characters weave their way through relationships as the story moves from the glacial terrain of Chamonix into the spectacular and ancient scenery of Loch Eriboll, Assynt and Torridon. Loch Eriboll Read my comic novel, Sky Dance, set against the challenges facing the battle for rewilding in the Highlands of Scotland. Get your copy HERE
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  • Harold Raeburn – The Steps of a Giant: Peter Biggar | Podcast

    Harold Raeburn – The Steps of a Giant: Peter Biggar | Podcast
    Apr 13 2024
    Harold Raeburn is acknowledged as the father of Scottish mountaineering. At the dawn of the twentieth century he was pushing the boundaries of what was possible on the ice wreathed cliffs of the Scottish mountains and later in the Himalayas. Listen to author, Peter Biggar, talk about his new book, Harold Raeburn- The Steps of a Giant and his quest to chronicle the life and achievements of this enigmatic figure whose name will be written forever on the face of Scottish climbing. Raeburn was not a climber who sought to publicise his achievements and only wrote about them in very modest terms. For this reason, as Peter explains in the interview, researching the book was often difficult and the author frequently had to rely on the accounts of Raeburn's contemporary's. Peter Biggar author Harold Raeburn As Scottish Mountaineering Press, the book's publishers, explains the background to the book. In feats of extraordinary vitality, he made winter ascents of Tower Ridge, North-East Buttress and Crowberry Gully in four days, cycling from Fort William to Glencoe in between. His breath taking ascent of Green Gully, cutting steps up near-vertical ice with a single axe, was doubtless the hardest ice climb anywhere at the time and was unsurpassed in difficulty in Scotland for nearly three decades. But perhaps Raeburn’s finest achievement was the first winter ascent in 1920 of Observatory Ridge, which remains one of Ben Nevis’s longest and most serious winter climbs. These routes, amongst so many others, were visionary, while beyond Scotland, he pioneered climbs in the Alps, Norway and the Caucasus, attempted Kangchenjunga and was Climbing Leader on the calamitous 1921 British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition. Tragically, the latter was to be his undoing, precipitating a ‘melancholia’ that had perhaps, to some degree, dogged him all his life. With extracts from Raeburn’s own elegant writings and accounts from his friends and climbing companions, The Steps of a Giant is an intimate portrait of a master craftsman, chronicling his outstanding mountaineering record while digging beneath the surface of his modest reserve to reveal a complex, driven character upon whose shoulders subsequent generations of climbing luminaries stand. SMP This is an important book and one which rightfully holds its place in the history of Scottish Mountaineering. John D Burns
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