Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Walking in Scotland

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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For independent walkers planning a trip to Scotland, this book is a portable encyclopaedia. It covers a huge range, from easy walks to exposed ridge-walks and mountain ascents, from a short half-day hike to the Southern Upland Way (two weeks).

As you would expect from Lonely Planet, the authors are strong on environmental issues and thorough on practical information. In 408 pages of densely-packed text they cover the whole of Scotland; the secret of easy access is to use their handy 4-page table of walks organised by region. There is a useful index and glossary, and each walk is supported by a small-scale contour map.

It seems churlish to criticise such a worthy volume for offering too much, but do walkers really need so much detailed data? Price and contact information obsolesce very quickly, as LP clearly knows, and such crowded pages are hard to read in poor light or on a train. You need two strong hands to hold the book open, and even so the gutter is so narrow that you lose the ends of lines of text. As a one-stop resource for walking in Scotland, however, this book is superb value.

I found this book remarkably unhelpful. It was often maddeningly difficult to figure out which map went with which walk, and the walks were not described very clearly. Once I got to Scotland, there was a wealth of great walking books available everywhere, including the wonderful Cicerone guides, and the Pathfinder series published by the Ordinance Survey company, maker of the great topo maps in the UK. I ended up leaving my Lonely Planet guide in a cafe (on purpose), and using my newly purchased local guidebooks instead. The Cicerone and Pathfinder books are available on Amazon, and I highly recommend you skip the Lonely Planet and use these other books.

"Walking in Scotland" is like many Lonely Planet guides: packed with useful information in a compact form. Scotland is a superb environment for walking, with a surprising amount of beautiful, even wild areas which offer a huge variety of potential hikes, from easy day hikes to multi-day treks.

"Walking in Scotland" starts with an introduction to Scotland itself, with short descriptions of climate, terrain, and history. This guide includes a run-down on the practicalities of travelling to and around Scotland.

The bulk of the guide covers Scotland by region, with short sections for urban walking in Glasgow and Edinbugh, and much longer sections on the Highlands and Northwest Scotland. The longer routes such as the West Highland Way and the more popular areas such as Glen Coe and the Cairngorms are included. The walking sections include descriptions and diagrams of the more interesting routes, along with tips on local history, transportation, and accomodation. The guide is sprinkled with a few well-chosen photographs that provide a sense of scale for the terrain in Scotland.

This guide provides more than sufficient information for a traveler to plan a walking vacation in Scotland. Walkers are advised to follow the advice of the guide and pick up more detailed maps once in Scotland. Ordnance Survey and other brands are readily available in Information Centers and Sporting Goods stores in Scotland. Weather conditions are highly variable in Scotland and the lack of a detailed map may leave the walker literally stranded in the fog in some areas.

The downside of the compact size of this guide is that some of the maps and diagrams are so small as to be a challenge to read in anything but good light.

This guide is highly recommended to those contemplating a walking vacation in Scotland.

This guide could have used a few more photos, but in general, some very well thought out suggestions. Hiking in Scotland seems to present the challenge of "where to begin," but this work has helped my wife and me narrow our selection considerably. The problem with guidebooks are (in my opinion) twofold: they go out of date fairly quickly in the case of lodging; they are by definition subjective. Several of the lodgings the we tried to find out more about are no longer in operation (or contact information has changed), and truth be told I'm not certain if my wife and I are the kinds of trekkers that the Lonely Planet typically targets (this is nothing against Lonely Planet, it is just our first guide from them). But as far as a handbook of where to start looking, I'd highly recommend this work. I had spent literally HOURS on the internet trying to get some bearings, and this book gave this begin an idea of where to start. More feedback when we return from our trip.