Reviews for English Hours

The average rating for English Hours based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-05 00:00:00 Gary Squires This book contained much that was of interest, but I found the style of writing made it very hard work to read. It was more like a thesis than a book and at times the text rambled far into the Scottish mountains. In the end I desperately wanted to move on to the next book but was determined to finish.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-19 00:00:00 Kimberly Game "Ministers everywhere ..." This book is about the early days of Scottish hillwalking, before there was such a thing as a "mountaineer", by which Mitchell means someone specifically equipped to climb mountains, who does so for the sheer joy of being there. (In this context, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word "mountaineer" to around 1860, which fits reasonably well into Mitchell's scheme.) So this is about poachers and gamekeepers, lookouts and soldiers, botanists and surveyors, mainly during the three centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Mitchell has trawled the early records of life and travel in Scotland, searching for evidence of ascents carried out while people were going about their business in the hills. It's a marvellous exploration of the byways of Scottish history, during which we encounter some formidable pedestrians. Many of them, as Mitchell points out, were ministers of the church - stuck in remote locations with spare time to cultivate their interests, and a responsibility to return statistical accounts of their parishes, some turned out to be intrepid explorers from Monday to Saturday. In the nineteenth century, the distinction between "mountaineer" and "non-mountaineer" became blurred, as increasing numbers of people travelled to Scotland in order to wander the landscape. And so we find first recorded ascents of Scottish mountains by Queen Victoria (with a retinue, of course) and Algernon Swinburne, among others. In Skye, the initial exploration of the Cuillin came so late that we actually know who some of the hills were named for: Sgurr Alasdair for Alexander Nicolson, Sgurr Mhic Choinnich for John Mackenzie. Through the whole narrative, we see how the Scottish landscape has changed over the centuries - cleared of its trees and its people and much of its wildlife, filled with a monoculture of sheep or deer. The landscape that gives joy to modern Scottish hillwalkers is an unnatural and impoverished one. As an appendix to the second edition, Mitchell reproduces an article originally published in The Angry Corrie, dealing with the "closure" of the Scottish hills in 2001 as a result of the UK foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. While it sits slightly uneasily next to the overall content of the book, it's a fine reminder of a time when the philosophical divide between hill-walker and land-owner was at its starkest.