Those of you who read all the way to the end of my walk report from Glen Doll last year will know that I lost a good friend when Dave Hewitt died on 24 November. You can read his obituary, written by Robert Dawson Scott and published in The Scotsman, here.

Dave has featured sporadically on this blog, either as an adviser in matters hill-related, or as the “Ochils Old Hand” with whom I shared a couple of walks. He and I met back in the ’90s, when he was editing The Angry Corrie, “Scotland’s First & Best Hillwalker’s Fanzine”, to which I sporadically contributed. And it was Dave’s TACit Press that published my first book, Munro’s Fables, beautifully illustrated by Chris Tyler.

The Angry Corrie, familiarly known as TAC, was published over a period of twenty years, from 1991 to 2011, though issues became less frequent as Dave found other occupations. Dave and cofounder Doug Small (always credited as “Perkin Warbeck”), conceived it as a subversive alternative to the romanticized “mighty peaks in wintry raiment” school of hill journalism. It was very funny, but also addressed serious issues about land use and access, and more than once took mainstream writers and presenters to task, in forensic detail. And Dave brought a particular surreal bent to the whole endeavour—the search for “blank squares” on Ordnance Survey maps; the frequent comparisons of utterly different things that sounded alike (Perthshire and Persia, cycle-paths and psychopaths) … and the Christmas quiz (dear God, the Christmas quiz).

Almost a quarter-century after the last issue of TAC (number 78), people were still reminiscing about it online. I eventually scanned my complete run of TACs (Dave posted me one of the few remaining copies of TAC1), and uploaded them to the Internet Archive. You can find them here.

And so, a week after his death, a group of us decided that we needed to put together one final edition of TAC, the Dave Hewitt Memorial Edition. We posted appeals for contributions on various Scottish hillwalking websites, and material flooded in, from single-paragraph anecdotes to three-page memoirs. Vitally, TAC’s two resident cartoonists, Chris Tyler and Craig Smillie, got on board. We ended up with enough material to fill two conventional twenty-page TACs. So that’s what’s been preoccupying me these last few months—laying out forty-odd pages in the style of the Original TAC (black-and-white, just four typefaces) with a wee “colour supplement” of photographs at the end. You can find it here.

Inside, you’ll find many fond reminiscences of Dave—as a hillwalker, as a journalist, as an editor and sub-editor, as a chess player, and just as a warm and friendly human being. You’ll find stuff written by Dave. On page 2, you’ll find TAC’s Origin Story, finally revealed by Perkin Warbeck. On page 6, there’s a discussion of his epic 80-day hike along the Scottish watershed. On page 8, by way of contrast, you can learn about the Lennon-to-McCartney Walk, from the John Lennon Memorial Garden in Durness to the Mull of Kintyre, via various places selected on the basis of excruciating puns on Beatles titles. On page 20, the longest straight line in Britain that doesn’t cross a road … and the people who decided they’d walk along it.

On page 30 Graham Benny recounts how active Dave was in the Reclaimers Movement, which opened up the Scottish countryside after access had been shut down during the Foot-and-Mouth outbreak of 2001, and how this fed into the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003, which codified the Scottish “right to roam”.

On page 32, we learn how bad the hill-bagging bug can get, and on page 42 Dave’s alter ego, Murdo Munro (“He’s a bugger of a bagger”), finally manages to climb the Inaccessible Pinnacle.

And there’s (as TAC’s cover text always rightly claimed) “… much, much more”.

I wrote a few things, here and there, including one last, slightly surreal Lachlan story. And I can here exclusively reveal that I am also the mystical astrologer Dr Dreich, who had his first outing in the pages of TAC in 1999, and who returned in TAC79 to share his Hill Horrorscopes for 2026.