A Lifetime of Mountains

Second only to Alistair Cooke's Letter from America, Harry Griffin's 'Country Diary' column for the "Guardian" was the longest-running regular feature in the British media, running uninterrupted for some 52 years until his death in 2004. Consequently, a collection of the best of these columns is both a moving and remarkable digest of one man's long and varied life and a matchless chronicle of a landscape and a community - the English Lake District - over the decades. Harry Griffin was an outdoor man: a climber, a walker, a wanderer, and this book will appeal to anyone who loves the wild parts of the British landscape. Also it is a fascinating social history of rural life, vanished and present, from solitary hill shepherds to slate miners, mountain hares to mountain hares to mountain rescue teams. And it is an insight into the mind of a man who loved the mountains and hills and their remote beauty, but also wanted people to live among them.