The View from the Shoulder

The story of surfing in Scotland is defined by people who dared to dream in spite of the cold, from Neva MacDonald-Haig and the coffin-lid surfers of Machrihanish, who first took to the waves off the west coast in the 1930s with a little help from a local undertaker, to Andy Bennetts and the pioneers of the 1960s, who discovered many of the nation's best breaks, to contemporary big wave surfer Ben Larg, a native of the tiny island of Tiree who now travels the world riding skyscraper-sized walls of water for a living.
Scotland is also home to a rich and distinctive surfing culture, with its own surfboard shapers, surf instructors, surf filmmakers, surf photographers and surf fashion brands, not to mention surf-inspired artists and musicians. Professional contests held at some of Scotland's best waves have drawn visits from surfing world champions including Tom Curren, Sunny Garcia and John John Florence, and in recent years Scotland's own surfers have begun to make their presence felt on the competitive stage, with the Scottish surf team featuring at the World Surfing Games and at Eurosurf after finally gaining official recognition in 2014.
The View From the Shoulder draws together 20 years of surf journalism from the pages of The Scotsman newspaper, together with fresh context, to create a portrait of a wave-riding community like no other.

Roger Cox has been writing about surfing in The Scotsman since 2005 and has contributed a weekly outdoors column to the paper since 2009, majoring on surfing, skiing and snowboarding but also taking in everything from climbing and kayaking to spear-fishing and long-distance paragliding. He has been the paper's arts editor since 2013 and in 2020 he won Innovation of the Year at the British Journalism Awards for establishing the Scotsman Sessions - a series of video performances recorded by artists all around Scotland, introduced by Scotsman arts critics.