Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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Of all the books published to mark the 50th anniversary of climbing Mount Everest Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind stands out as by far one of the most intelligent and interesting. It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees.

Mountains for the Mind is about inspiring friends, colleagues and loved ones to take the first steps towards better mental health.

The convex surface of the glacier looked hard, silvered and pitted like old metal, and it was pocked with stones which had fallen from the cliffs above.

Uncluttered horizons liberate the mind like nothing else and it's no coincidence that the Left in this country should fall on access to the countryside, particularly our wild uplands, with such ardour. At night the explorers melted their way inch by agonizing inch into their reindeer-hair sleeping-bags, which the cold had hardened into icy scabbards. From this moment I remember a rivulet of water running darkly down the rock-rib in front of my eyes, the minute cross-hatchings on the fabric of my waterproof jacket and a little yellow Alpine flower tucked into a pocket of rock.The premise of the sublime, the balance point of fear and exhilaration that could be achieved when climbing, coupled with the sense that the mountains were much, much older than previousl Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents' house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight for Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest. Luck, also, is conveyed both in accounts of personal experiences -- rocks bounding down at him, his life depending on the last bounce of the boulder, or the slip into a glacier crevasse -- and historical examples (generally of less fortunate folk).