There’s a whole cottage industry built on turning the Highlands into a wellness product. A woman in a beanie walks into “the wild,” cries prettily, emerges “healed,” and the mountains get cast as a silent therapist who never invoices. It’s grief repackaged as self-improvement, danger repackaged as aesthetic, and the land reduced to a branded backdrop for personal transformation. Sarah Jane Douglas’s Just Another Mountain refuses that shelf. Not politely. Not with a gentle caveat. She refuses it by writing the hills as they are: cold, indifferent, and capable of killing you.
Douglas is a Highlander, and that matters because she doesn’t write the place like an expensive weekend away. Her memoir grows out of a life ruptured early—her mother dies of breast cancer when Douglas is twenty-four—and the book’s engine is what happens after the sympathetic headline wears off. Not epiphany. Not “closure.” Repetition. Discipline. The hard fact of days that still arrive. She turns to Munros, yes, but she doesn’t sell that turn as mystical redemption. She writes walking as something closer to an action you can still perform when everything else is collapsing: boots on, head down, one foot after another. It isn’t therapy. It’s survival with no guarantee attached.
The Highlands don’t “heal” you. They strip you of your storybook nonsense and leave you with weather, terrain, and whatever you brought up there to wrestle.
That’s the moral correction the genre hates. “Nature writing” is often a soft scam: it flatters the reader into thinking hardship is virtuous as long as it comes with views. Douglas won’t play the view game. The mountains in her book aren’t a mood. They’re risk, logistics, consequence. She’s honest about fear, about the body’s limits, about how quickly ambition can turn compulsive when grief is driving. Even the Munroist tick-list—so easily romanticised as wholesome perseverance—gets exposed as a coping mechanism that can become its own trap. Not because she’s ashamed of it, but because she’s not interested in selling the reader an uplifting conversion narrative.
And then there’s the publishing impulse to tidy her into inspiration. The title alone, with its “Memoir of Hope” framing, is an invitation for the market to sanitise what she’s actually doing. Water it down. Turn it into a “brave” story with a shine. But Douglas’s voice keeps scraping that shine off. She doesn’t aestheticise illness or grief into a lifestyle. She doesn’t offer the reader a moral ladder: do this hard thing and you, too, will be redeemed. That’s not just better writing; it’s ethical. Because the “mountains saved me” story often comes with an ugly subtext: if you’re still broken, you didn’t hike correctly.
Douglas’s refusal also lands as a class critique, whether the book waves that flag or not. The therapeutic Highlands narrative is frequently written for people with the money, time, and cultural permission to treat the outdoors as a self-care regime. Douglas writes from the inside of a real place, where land isn’t an abstract balm and weather isn’t optional. Her Highlands are lived, not consumed. That shifts everything. The danger stops being a flirtation and starts being a fact. And when danger is treated as fact, the reader can’t keep pretending this is just a pretty route to personal growth.
If you turn the hills into therapy, you turn risk into a prop—and you train readers to confuse discomfort with courage and catastrophe with meaning.
That’s why her book matters even beyond its own story. It pushes back against a cultural habit: packaging the harsh world into content that reassures the consumer. Douglas doesn’t reassure. She doesn’t promise transformation. She shows you how a person keeps moving when the “lesson” never arrives and the loss doesn’t become noble. She shows you the stubbornness of continuing. Not as inspiration. As reality.
So no, the Highlands aren’t therapy in Douglas’s hands, and thank God for that. Let the mountains stay dangerous. Let grief stay unconvertible. Let survival be repetitive and unsexy and true. If you want a soothing wilderness cure, buy a candle. If you want the land written as land, with consequences attached, read Douglas and stop asking her to make it comforting. Insist on the danger. Insist on the truth.
