12 Best Hiking Books for 2026 (Guides + Memoirs)

Last checked: July 2026. We take no commission on any book listed here.

Every book on this list is real. Title, author and publisher have been checked against the publisher's own catalogue. That ought to go without saying, but in 2026 a great many "best hiking books" lists are assembled by machines that are quite happy to invent an author, and you only find out when the book doesn't arrive.

We're a small family business in Ireland. We put walkers on the Kerry Way, the Dingle Way and the Wicklow Way most weeks of the season, and these are the twelve books we actually reach for — five guides you'd carry on an Irish trail, three that explain the ground under your boots, and four that are simply the finest walking books written.

The 12 best hiking books for 2026, at a glance

1. Walking the Kerry Way — John Raffaldi (Cicerone, 2024)
2. Walking the Wicklow Way — Paddy Dillon (Cicerone, 2021)
3. Kerry Way — Sandra Bardwell & John G. O'Dwyer (Rucksack Readers, 3rd ed.)
4. Dingle Way — Sandra Bardwell & Jacquetta Megarry (Rucksack Readers, 4th ed. 2023)
5. Irish Peaks — Mountaineering Ireland (2020)
6. Endurance: Heroic Journeys in Ireland — Dermot Somers (O'Brien Press, 2005)
7. The Way That I Went — Robert Lloyd Praeger (1937)
8. Thirty-Two Words for Field — Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020)
9. Wild — Cheryl Strayed (Knopf, 2012)
10. Grandma Gatewood's Walk — Ben Montgomery (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
11. A Walk in the Woods — Bill Bryson (Doubleday, 1997)
12. The Old Ways — Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 2012)

Guides you'd actually carry on an Irish trail

1. Walking the Kerry Way — John Raffaldi (Cicerone, 2024)

The newest guide to the Kerry Way and the one we'd hand a guest first. Raffaldi describes the full 190km circuit anti-clockwise from Killarney in ten stages, with 1:50,000 mapping, accommodation listings and honest notes on the wet bits. What lifts it above a plain route description is the side trips — Carrauntoohil, the pilgrim path up Cnoc na dTobar, the boat landing on Skellig Michael — which is exactly how people actually walk Kerry rather than marching head-down for the finish.

Cicerone publish only two Irish walking guides at present. This is one of them, and it earns its place. See the Kerry Way.

2. Walking the Wicklow Way — Paddy Dillon (Cicerone, 2021)

Dillon has written over a hundred guidebooks and it shows: this is a lean, unfussy seven-stage description of Ireland's first long-distance trail, from the edge of Dublin to Clonegal in County Carlow. Forest track, open moor, Glendalough, and a finish in a village pub. GPX files download free from Cicerone with the book.

If you're deciding between Ireland's two most-walked trails, our guests find this comparison settles it faster than any guidebook can. See the Wicklow Way.

3. Kerry Way — Sandra Bardwell & John G. O'Dwyer (Rucksack Readers, 3rd ed.)

The Rucksack Readers guides are printed on rainproof paper, which in Kerry is not a gimmick. It's slimmer than the Cicerone — 88 pages — and the photography is generous, so it doubles as the thing you leave on the kitchen table to talk somebody into coming with you. O'Dwyer knows the ground: he's one of Ireland's most-read walking columnists.

4. Dingle Way — Sandra Bardwell & Jacquetta Megarry (Rucksack Readers, 4th ed., 2023)

There is no Cicerone guide to the Dingle Way. This is the book, and it's rainproof too. It covers the full loop out of Tralee, round the peninsula under Mount Brandon and back — roughly 180km depending on which variants you take. If you want the mapping bigger and on the wall while you plan, EastWest Mapping's 1:40,000 Dingle Way sheet is the companion piece.

The Dingle Way is the one our guests most often describe afterwards as the trip they didn't expect. See the Dingle Way.

5. Irish Peaks — Mountaineering Ireland (2020)

A big, handsome hardback compiling 72 hillwalking routes across every major Irish range, built from routes contributed by Mountaineering Ireland's own members and compiled by Alan and Margaret Tees. It won the guidebook prize at the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Awards. Fair warning: the second edition is sold out at the publisher, so you're looking at bookshops and the second-hand market. Worth the hunt.

Ireland under your boots

Three books that don't tell you where to turn left, but change what you see when you get there.

6. Endurance: Heroic Journeys in Ireland — Dermot Somers (O'Brien Press, 2005)

Somers is the real thing: the first Irishman to climb the six great north faces of the Alps, on Irish expeditions to Changtse, Manaslu and Everest. In Endurance he takes the great journeys of Irish history and myth — O'Sullivan Beare's terrible winter march, Red Hugh O'Donnell's escape across the Wicklow Mountains — and walks the ground himself. Read the O'Donnell chapter before you walk the Wicklow Way and the hills change shape.

His short-story collection At the Rising of the Moon (Baton Wicks, 1994) won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. It's the better book, if you only take one.

7. The Way That I Went — Robert Lloyd Praeger (1937)

Praeger, a botanist, walked every county in Ireland and wrote it down, and the result — subtitled An Irishman in Ireland — is the book every other Irish landscape writer is quietly standing on. Ninety years old and still in print. It is not a guidebook and it will not get you to Glenbeigh, but it will tell you why the ground there looks the way it does.

8. Thirty-Two Words for Field — Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020)

Subtitled Lost Words of the Irish Landscape. Magan's argument is that the Irish language carries a resolution of detail about land and weather that English simply doesn't have — and that as the words go, the seeing goes with them. There are thirty-two words for a field because there were thirty-two kinds of field worth naming. Read it and half the place names on your map stop being noise and start being descriptions.

The walking books people press into each other's hands

9. Wild — Cheryl Strayed (Knopf, 2012)

Full title: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed, twenty-six, wrecked by her mother's death and her own divorce, walked eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with a rucksack she could barely lift and boots that took her toenails. It became the book that put a generation of people on long trails who had never considered walking one.

We meet its readers constantly. Something in it gives people permission.

10. Grandma Gatewood's Walk — Ben Montgomery (Chicago Review Press, 2014)

In 1955, Emma Gatewood told her grown children she was going for a walk. She was sixty-seven. She had raised eleven children and survived thirty years of a violent marriage. She walked the entire Appalachian Trail alone in Keds sneakers, carrying a homemade sack — then did it twice more. Montgomery had her diaries and letters, and he tells it plainly, which is the only way it could be told.

If you're over sixty and quietly wondering whether you've left it too late: read this one first.

11. A Walk in the Woods — Bill Bryson (Doubleday, 1997)

Bryson and his gloriously unfit friend Katz fail to walk the Appalachian Trail, and it is very funny. It is also, underneath, an unusually honest book about what long-distance walking is really like for ordinary, ill-prepared people — which is to say most of us. Excellent for the flight over.

12. The Old Ways — Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 2012)

Subtitled A Journey on Foot. Macfarlane follows old paths — drove roads, holloways, pilgrim tracks, sea roads — and asks what a path is and what it does to the person walking it. The prose is worth the money on its own. It is the book we'd give somebody who says they don't understand why anybody would walk for a week on purpose.

Also worth your money

• The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd (Aberdeen University Press, 1977). Written in the 1940s, published thirty years later. A hundred pages on the Cairngorms and the best book about being in mountains anyone has written.
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking — Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2000). Walking as thought, as protest, as freedom.
• On Trails: An Exploration — Robert Moor (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Why paths exist at all — from ant trails to the Appalachian Trail.
• The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker — Merlin Coverley (Oldcastle Books, 2012). The walker-writer from the pilgrims to the psychogeographers.

Maps, not books

No guidebook replaces the map. For Ireland, the standard is the Discovery Series at 1:50,000, published by Tailte Éireann — the body that took over from Ordnance Survey Ireland on 1 March 2023, so if a shop is selling you an "OSi" sheet, it's simply older stock, not a different map. There's also an Adventure & Activity series at 1:25,000 for the higher ground. For the Dingle Way specifically, EastWest Mapping's 1:40,000 sheet is the best single piece of paper you can carry.

Questions we get asked

Do I need a guidebook if I'm on a self-guided walking holiday?

Not strictly. We give every guest detailed route notes, maps and GPX tracks for their trail, and the routes are waymarked. But most people enjoy the trip more with a guidebook, because the notes tell you where to go and the guidebook tells you what you're looking at. Buy it three months out, not the week before — half the pleasure is in the planning.

Which one book, if I only buy one?

The guidebook to the trail you're actually walking. After that, Grandma Gatewood's Walk — it does more good in the world than any of the others.

Why isn't The Salt Path on this list?

Because significant parts of it have been publicly disputed, and this is a list about books you can trust. We'd rather leave a famous name off than put your money behind something we can't stand over.

Come and use them

Books are a poor substitute for a week of Atlantic weather and a pint at the end of it. We run self-guided walking holidays on the Kerry Way, the Dingle Way and the Wicklow Way, and on a good many quieter trails besides. We book the B&Bs, move your bag from door to door, and leave you to walk.

If you've a book we've missed — a real one — tell us. We update this list every year.