Linda Cracknell’s latest ‘best foot book’ inspired by walking, ‘Following our Fathers: Two Journeys among Mountains’ takes the reader to Norway and the Swiss Alps, but on Saturday took its launch party for mountain air onto the summit of Perthshire hill, Dùn Coillich, community-owned land under the shoulder of Schiehallion near Aberfeldy.

Linda Cracknell set off to follow in the footsteps of two men, one who walked across Nazi-occupied Norway in 1944, and one who climbed in the Swiss Alps in 1952. Both died as young men from cancer in 1961, and her own journeys made memorials to the men as fathers, one of them her own.

Cameron McNeish said of the book: ‘Thought provoking and beautifully descriptive, this is the story of … a life or death tramp through the mountains of Norway; an Alpine climbing adventure with a cruel and disastrous climax and the two expeditions those journeys later inspired. But in the braiding of all four journeys Linda Cracknell leads us on another journey – a woven trail of paternal influence and discovery.’

Normally a writer of fiction and radio plays, this non-fiction account records her own search for meaning in walking, and for the memory of her father. ‘My father died when I was very young. I knew he’d been a keen mountaineer, and I seemed to have inherited some of that passion, so walking was the perfect way to make my connection with him tangible.’

Her first Alpine climb targeted the 4,274 metre peak, Finsteraarhorn. ‘As a cowardly climber myself, the thought that I had bitten off more than I could chew was never far away!’ she said.

Robert Macfarlane, writer of The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind, called the book, ‘A wonderfully subtle pair of stories about walking, wayfaring and memory. Cracknell explores the strange durability of the paths that we make in our lives, in our dreams and after our deaths.’

‘Following our Fathers: Two Journeys among Mountains’ is available from www.lindacracknell.com, The Aberfeldy Watermill, and various other local outlets for £6.

Source: Linda Cracknell