What happens when we pay close attention to nature? A Sense of Place, about my residency with the Cairngorms National Park, first appeared in the 2020 Summer issue of The Author. ‘Do you see them? There’s a ruby – and over there, a sapphire!’ The senior gentleman points his walking stick into the long, frosted grass where […]
It’s the Cairngorms Nature at Home Big 10 Days! This WAS going to be the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend and I WAS going to be over with the rangers in The Cabrach in Morayshire leading a family story-making session. Hopefully, all of that can still happen next year, but in the meantime the folks at […]
Do you love maps? I find them fascinating, so when I was invited by Walk Highlands to write an article about what to do when we can’t walk very far, Map Gazing immediately sprung to mind. It’s what I did for a long time before making my pilgrimage to Angel’s Peak and what I did […]
I’d always heard about the forgotten glen round the back of Newtonmore, in the south-east corner of the Cairngorms National Park. There are ruins there and old, old stories. Someone said you could see eagles, and one of the Wildcat Trails goes that way. A long time ago, everyone went that way. The locals pronounce […]
From the comfort of my sofa in a warm living room, I have just booked myself onto my first ever mountain winter skills course. It is the middle of January in Scotland and having just returned from several weeks of the Australian summer, I feel plunged into darkness. Jet lag casts me onto the endless […]
In February I invited you to come with me on a journey into the Cairngorms. Thank you for your company! 2019 has certainly been a significant year: being Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park has been my dream job and I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity. It’s hard to sum […]
Well that’s a wrap! On the 21st of November we raised our glasses and cheers in a celebration event to mark the end of the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project and to launch the anthology of writing that was gathered across the year. Wonderfully, some people travelled from as far as Falkirk, […]
Last week I described my first outing with the Health Walk Group in Glen Tanar. As Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many kinds of people of all ages right across this vast and varied landscape. Some of them have eagerly signed up to attend a […]
Though the Glen Tanar Health Walk group love where they walk and were very happy to have me join them, it was made clear that they did not want to do any writing. I said, ok, I could certainly work on that understanding. In fact, most of my engagement with the Health Walk groups for […]
What is your hope for the Cairngorms? It’s a question I put to the audience at a talk I gave last month in Inverness. I was lucky enough to be on the programme of Ness Book Fest, a vibrant and fast-growing literature festival held every October in the Highland capital. Running since 2016, the festival […]