Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane, Granta, £20, ISBN 1862075611 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
UNTIL relatively recent times, no one in their right mind could have written about “our love for mountains”. Mountains were horrible, sinister excrescences on the Earth’s surface, to be avoided if possible, journeyed through in terror if necessary and well-known as the haunts of monsters.
It was a combination of the aesthetic and the scientific that led to a change, explains John Macfarlane in this magnificent book, along with a growing appreciation of the spectacular beauty of mountain landscape, curiosity about their geology and the…
