One of Scotland's most well-known broadcasters and champion of the great outdoors, Tom Weir, has died. The 91-year-old was best known through his long running stv series Weirs Way in which he explored the Scottish countryside. He passed away yesterday at a retirement home in Balloch. Weir became a pioneering campaigner for the protection of the Scottish environment, and wrote a column for The Scots Magazine for over 50 years. From 1976–1987, he hosted the Scottish Television series Weir's Way, meeting the people of Scotland, exploring the landscape and its natural history. When STV repeated the series during the late night slot from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s it managed to achieve 30% audience share. [3] The series is now available on DVD in the UK. He was a climber, a naturalist, an explorer, a writer but most of all he was one of the first ever TV presenters to bring the beauty of Scotland's great outdoors to a worldwide audience. In his wooly bunnet and Fair Isle jumper, Tom Weir was an unmistakable figure roaming across the Scottish landscape. I wonder just how many people of a certain age were influenced into enjoying our surrounding countryside by the likes of Tom - I certainly was and I'm sure many others were too. A regular contributor to the well known and long established Scots Magazine, published by DC Thomson of Dundee, he contributed articles for more than 50 years, and also became a pioneering campaigner for the protection of the Scottish environment. In 1978 he was named Scottish radio and television personality of the year; in 1992 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society; in 2000 he received an MBE and was honoured with a John Muir lifetime achievement award, presented by his friend and fellow environmentalist, Adam Watson.

We wanted to let you know about it and hopefully generate some discussion about Tom and his legacy. We'd also like to invite you over to the channel to leave any comments about the walks he carried out, perhaps pointing out whether they've changed much since Tom and the STV cameras were there.

I discovered and bought these books in a second-hand book shop on Great Western Road in Glasgow in January 2020, exactly 50 years after being first published. We'll add any links to new episodes that we discover in the STV archive, including an interview with the great man which we uploaded just last week, Tom Weir at 70. That's so true about current TV content - that's why I don't have one - definitely not worth the licence fee! These programmes seemed to be ' gentle ' in that you could sit and enjoy and dream of the places and times , that the presenters were portraying - almost magical.

He was born in Glasgow's Springburn in 1914 and grew up without his father who was killed in the First World War. After his own war time service, he was employed as a surveyor for Ordinance Survey but soon established a full time career as a writer, climber and and photographer.

Born in Glasgow, and raised poor but happy in a Springburn tenement, Tom Weir finally settled in Gartocharn, West Dunbartonshire. He died in the Sunningdale Retirement Home at Balloch (West Dunbartonshire), where he spent the last three years of his life. His sister, stage actress and writer Molly Weir (b.1910), passed away in 2004. In 1950 he was a member of the first post-war Himalayan expedition and, in 1952, was one of the first to explore the previously closed mountain ranges of Nepal, east of Kathmandu. [1] Media career and later life [ edit ] A statue of Tom Weir was unveiled on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond in 2014. [2] Another view of the statue