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Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020

There are books about Scotland that retread the well-worn paths of tourist itineraries and public history, and then there is Patrick Baker's The Unremembered Places. This is a book of journeys and of wildness, but it does not fetishise wildness - it aims to look beneath the surface at the forgotten human stories that underpin our perception of the landscape. Across nine chapters, each dealing with a different place, discovery and journey, the book is educational, enlightening and genuinely enjoyable.

Baker travels on foot and by paddle - from the high mountain passes of ancient droving routes to desolate moorland graveyards, from uninhabited post-industrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries. Along the way he encounters Neolithic settlements, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds. The book's blurb almost does it a disservice by describing it as a nature or travel read - it is so much more than that. The engineering marvel of the Lighthouse Stevensons, the geological debates on the formation of the Highlands, religious sites of theological significance, and threats in the Forth after American independence all add depth to places that might otherwise seem bereft of meaning.

What sets Baker apart from many writers in this genre is that the book never becomes overly self-referential - rather than putting his own stamp on the places, he lets the places put a stamp upon him, and therefore upon the reader. He achieves a careful balance between describing his own adventures and his research into the history and geography of each location. That said, there are moments where the accounts of arduous hill walks and canoe trips in squall-lashed lochs do labour the point slightly. Writers of travel books, even when the travel is a voyage into the past, are sometimes too inclined to think that how they got there is every bit as interesting as what they found on arrival. But this is a minor quibble, and many will find the physical endeavour of reaching these outposts a compelling part of the narrative.

The most intriguing idea running through the book is that places themselves are capable of emotional transference - that landscape can serve as a repository of collective memory for those willing to listen and learn rather than simply see what is in front of them. The most affecting passages describe Baker's visits to Blackwater Reservoir in Lochaber, constructed in horrific conditions by Irish navvies, and the deserted Clearance village of Bourblaige on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. These sections are quietly devastating - the kind of writing that reshapes how you think about a hillside or a ruined wall.

There is one notable geographical gap: Fife, the Lothians, the Borders and Scotland's four major cities are absent, though there are unremembered places in all of them. This perhaps panders, however unconsciously, to the idea that the Scotland where most people live and work is not the real Scotland. But Baker writes about what draws him, and what draws him - islands, caves, abandoned settlements, ghost-like auras of sanctity - he writes about exceptionally well.

The prose makes for slow, steady reading, perfectly suited to savouring rather than rushing through. Each chapter is a fascinating slice of folk history - broad and occasionally meandering, but in a way that mirrors the journeys themselves, and none of the essays outstay their welcome. This is a book that will send you searching for maps, ordering obscure histories and - if you are at all susceptible to the pull of wild places - lacing up your boots. It is a monument to slow travel, to instinctive and emotional responses to the passing of time, and to landscape as a record of immense social change.