Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling,
unclassifiable book - Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman Compelling ... admirable
and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet's eye worthy of
Hughes - Erica Wagner, New Statesman Carved from the land above
Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, Scout Rock is a steep crag overlooking
wooded slopes and weed-tangled plateaus. To many it is unremarkable; to
others it is a doomed place where 18th-century thieves hid out, where the
town tip once sat, and where suicides leapt to their deaths. Its brooding
form presided over the early years of Ted Hughes, who called Scout Rock 'my
spiritual midwife . . . both the curtain and backdrop to existence'. Into
this beautiful, dark and complex landscape steps Benjamin Myers, asking:
are unremarkable places made remarkable by the minds that map them? The
result is a lyrical and unflinching investigation into nature, literature,
history, memory and the meaning of place in modern Britain.