Enjoying Scotland

Enjoying Scotland (1972) by Campbell Steven
The Travel Book Club • ISBN: none (because beauty seldom bothers with barcodes)
Condition: Good — faithfully supplied by Crappy Old Books

Open this handsome, clubbable volume and step into a Scotland where maps crackle, roads have passing places that double as social events, and weather is best described as “character-building with scenic intervals.” Campbell Steven writes with that brisk, well-booted optimism of the classic British travel guide: part coach driver, part kindly headmaster, part enthusiastic meteorologist. The thesis is simple and deeply correct: Scotland is enjoy-able—provided you dress sensibly, walk toward the view, and accept that the midges are unionised.

You’ll get the full tartan symphony—lochs pretending to be mirrors, glens that do chiaroscuro, islands that play hard to get—but also the humane logistics that turn postcards into weekends: where to find a tearoom when the cloud comes down, why the single-track road is a personality test, and how to behave on a ferry as if you’ve always known which side the land will be on. There’s the cheerful taxonomy of castles (ruinous and photogenic vs. habitable and slightly drafty), the civilised appreciation of ceilidhs (“cardio with fiddles”), and a robust respect for OS maps, which are treated as scripture with gridlines.

Expect gently ironical wisdom such as:

• The Five Weather Day, in which you experience all of them and still make your dinner reservation.

• Midge protocol: stand in the breeze, walk briskly, claim you’re “absolutely fine.”

• Munro arithmetic: climb one, become strangely certain you could do fifty-four, schedule physio for Tuesday.

• Shortbread logistics: buy it on arrival, pretend it’s for gifts, eat it before the second page of the chapter on Skye.

Steven’s tone is companionable and unflappable—never the bore who insists you pronounce everything in Gaelic before you’re allowed a sandwich. He evangelises for walks that begin at car parks and end in legends, for village shows where the baking is competitive but the gossip cooperative, and for that moment on a hill path when a break in the cloud pulls the landscape’s emergency cord and the whole stage lights up.

This particular copy from Crappy Old Books is graded Good—which in our dialect means sturdy, clean, and keen for another lap of the Cairngorms. The binding is shipshape, the pages ready to be consulted over soup, and the cover bears just enough patina to look at home on any shelf that knows the difference between drizzle and dreich. No ISBN, of course: 1972 preferred punctual trains and sensible shoes to databases.

File under: Travel, properly British, Meteorology for Romantics, and How to have a nice time even if the sky is editorial. Read it for the routes, keep it for the voice, and deploy it whenever someone suggests Scotland is only for August and postcards. It’s for every month that owns a vowel—and for anyone who recognises that a good day out is often just a good attitude, plus a thermos.

Crappy Old Books: we supply guidebooks with manners, mountains with opinions, and the quiet certitude that happiness can be achieved with a view, a path, and something buttered.

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