Hayloft is a small independent company and publishes books on a range of subjects, including history, mountaineering, poetry, humour, rural life, novels and memoirs.
Helen Mort 2020
In the Prologue to this dazzling, formidable journey on foot across the UK via county tops, Victoria Morris remarks: 'From the time I caught up with reality, I have been completing a mental farewell tour, realising one by one that my childhood ideals no longer exist and saying goodbye to them.' But this memoir, this homage to landcsape is proof that we can recreate those ideals through the paths we forge, inhabit them fully through writing. Like Nan Shepherd, Morris immerses herself in the hills, staying 'respectfully on the same side as the weather', biding her time as 'the landscape aches past'. She writes as poignantly about power lines as she does about the blush of exposed granite. Her journal is witty, frank and inspiring, alive to the ways that walking changes noticing: how 'common occurrences become omens', horizons shift, the ground's personality alters. Morris started her long walks as a way to fill the 'mountain-shaped hole' in her life at university. This book will fill the mountain-shaped hole in your imagination.
