Ten books about the outdoors to read this summer

Summer is the best season for reading outdoors, and it’s also the best season for reading about the outdoors. After all, books about the sea have always made the best beach reads, and books about mountains tend to feel more real when you’re sitting in a tent looking out at a real one. With the summer holidays just around the corner, here are some recent and imminent releases to consider taking with you on your next adventure.

​The Lost Elms, by Mandy Haggith For many years, Achmelvich-based writer and activist Mandy Haggith has been a sort of unofficial poet laureate of our woodlands. When I last interviewed her back in 2012, she had just taken up a post as writer-in-residence at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and was working her way through the Ogham, the ancient Gaelic alphabet in which each of the 18 letters corresponds to a different species of tree, writing a poem about a different tree every day. For her latest project, however, she's very much focused on one species of tree - the elm - and this book is billed as a love letter to the hundreds of millions of these trees wiped out globally by Dutch elm disease over the past century. (Wildfire, £22, 3 July)

Mandy Haggith | Chris Puddephatt

The Restless Coast, by Roger Morgan-Grenville Roger Morgan-Grenville is the author of several books about the natural world, most recently Waking Land (2023), which saw him trekking 1,000 miles north through Britain, following the advance of Spring. This new book sees him undertaking an even more impressive yomp around the coast of mainland Britain, hiking for around 2,000 miles of his journey and using public transport and hitchhiking to make up the rest. Along the way, he meets some of the people trying to protect our remaining wild places. (Icon, £22.99, out now)

​Community: People and Wildlife on the West Coast of Scotland, by Jane Smith Hard to know what to love more about this book: the crisp, precise writing style or the very stylish illustrations. Argyll-based nature artist Jane Smith travelled to various different locations in the west of Scotland to make Community, with each stop on her journey representing a different type of habitat. Her descriptions of the wildlife she encounters are wonderfully evocative, but she’s also concerned with the complex relationships between the people who live in these places and the natural world around them. (Birlinn, £17.99, out now)

Swimmingly: Adventures in Water, by Vassos Alexander As he trains for a swim across the English Channel, sports presenter Vassos Alexander takes a deep-dive into the history and culture of open water swimming, meeting everyone from elite athletes to enthusiastic amateurs. (Bloomsbury Sport, £16.99, out now)

​Upland: A Journey Through Time and the Hills, by Ian Crofton Writing in The Scotsman a few weeks ago, Allan Massie described Ian Crofton’s account of a lifetime walking the hills and mountains of Scotland, England and Wales as “a delightful book, beautifully written and rich in memories.” Also notable is Crofton’s tendency to derive as much enjoyment from climbing more modestly-sized hills as he does from scaling grander peaks.​ (Birlinn, £20, out now)

Ian Crofton | Contributed

​The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic, by Karl Bell Not only does Karl Bell’s new book provide a colourful compendium of the “merfolk, ghosts, phantom ships and sea monsters” that have populated the seafaring folklore of the Atlantic nations for centuries, he also looks at how and why these tales came into being, and how they evolved and mutated as they were transmitted from place to place over time. (Reaktion, £18, 1 July)

​Nic Wilson: Land Beneath the Waves Struggling with chronic health issues, Guardian Country Diarist Nic Wilson examines the ways in which the natural world has impacted on her life. Sample sentence: “The memories are papery and thin, like honesty seed heads some will blow away, but I can see through the layers to the kernels within.” (Summersdale, £18.99, out now)

​The Sound of Many Waters: A Journey Along the River Tay, by Robin Crawford Robin Crawford's last book, 2018’s Into the Peatlands, was an exploration of the ways in which the titular landscapes here in Scotland link us to our past. Now, in The Sound of Many Waters, he sets out to explore the River Tay, delving into its history and also charting the ways in which it has impacted on his own life. (Birlinn, £14.99, 3 July)

A Year with the Seals, by Alix Morris As the title suggests, this book sees Maine-based environmental journalist Alix Morris spend a 12 month period delving into the secret lives of seals. Along the way she meets the scientists who study them, the fishermen who curse them and the surfers and swimmers who now encounter seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters more frequently as seal numbers increase. (Ithaka, £16.99, 10 July)

​From the Mountain's Edge, by Ed Jackson When a neck injury left him paralysed in 2017, Ed Jackson wasn't sure if he'd ever walk again. Before long, however, he was back on his feet, determined to keep on pushing his limits and and training to climb Himlung Himal – a 7,126m peak in Nepal. In From the Mountain's Edge, he tells the remarkable story of that expedition, which quickly turned from the experience of a lifetime into a dramatic fight for survival. (HQ, £16.99, 17 July)

READ MORE: Children's books: the best new releases for the summer holidays