Penguin Random House has published Upland: The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain's Mountains by Ed Douglas, a 528-page survey of the British uplands that reaches from Roman lead mines to the modern water supply. The book, issued under the Vintage imprint (ISBN 9781847927538) on 9 July 2026, has now been reviewed in both The Guardian and The Scotsman.

The Guardian review, published on 28 July 2026 under the headline "a glorious survey of Britain's high places," notes that Douglas writes from direct familiarity with his subject. He lives on Totley Moor, in the eastern Peak District, and is a former editor of the Alpine Journal — the world's oldest mountaineering periodical, founded in 1862. The Scotsman ran its own review on 21 July 2026, highlighting chapters on Scottish peaks including Ben Nevis (The Scotsman).

One thread running through Upland is the question of what counts as a mountain. The book cites the American geographer Roderick Peattie, who wrote in 1936 that a mountain's defining quality was its capacity to "enter into the imagination of the people who lived in its shadows." By the 1990s, the United Nations had settled on something more measurable: a "mountainous" region is one where altitude varies by at least 300 metres over a 7-kilometre radius (The Guardian).

Douglas makes the case that these landscapes are not merely scenic. Britain's uplands supply more than 60% of the nation's water. They have also been mined and worked for centuries. At Wanlockhead — Scotland's highest village, sitting above 400 metres — the Romans extracted lead. After the Norman conquest, invaders set up operations in the Peak District and took a share of local lead-mining profits.

The book's reach extends well beyond Britain's borders. Douglas traces the origins of staple crops — potatoes, barley, maize, apples and tomatoes — to upland environments in other parts of the world, arguing that high ground has shaped not just national landscapes but global diets.

What gives Upland its texture is the combination of lived experience and archival range. Douglas does not survey from a distance; he writes from the millstone grit uplands he calls home, and the book moves between geological time and the human histories layered on top of it. The Guardian calls the result "glorious." Whether readers of The Scotsman or The Guardian agree is, as ever, their own business — but the book has now landed on shelves and drawn serious notice from two major papers within three weeks of publication.