John D. Burns talks to climber and mountaineer, Ian Crofton, about his new book Upland which charts Ian’s life in the mountains and delves into the history of our hills.
Ian Crofton’s books exploring the interplay of landscape, nature and history include Walking the Border: A Journey between Scotland and England, rated by both The Guardian and Trail magazine as ‘excellent’. His Fringed with Mud and Pearls: An English Island Odyssey was described by the BBC’s Countryfile as ‘really engaging’, and by Coast magazine as ‘a fascinating study about what it means to exist on the fringes’; it was selected by the Telegraph as one of their top twenty travel books of 2021. Crofton has also written a number of works of popular history, from Traitors and The Disappeared to A Curious History of Food and Drink. His Dictionary of Scottish Phrase and Fable was described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a lightly erudite and well-informed work of eclectic scholarship’. Crofton is a regular contributor to the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, and in 2015 was awarded the club’s W.H. Murray Literary Prize.
