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 […]
Hooray! It’s National Poetry Day today! For my five years at Kingussie High School library, this was always one of the highlights of my year, when we had poetry readings at lunchtime with drinks and biscuits. There was always a heart-thrilling mix of poems, including in other languages and, last year, in song. National Poetry […]
It was quiet when I arrived at the edge of Anagach woods, sunlight filtering down through giant trees, a soft breeze shifting the leaves. Gradually, people began to appear, some striding purposefully down the track, others making their way slowly with two sticks. Most were retirement age, all were local folk who gather every week […]
I’d heard about this wonderful wee festival that happens at the Highland Folk Museum every August – all about wood – but never made it along before (usually because it’s Edinburgh Festival season). But this year, I was lucky enough to have Forest Fest in my programme of activities for the Shared Stories: A Year […]
At the start of this year, I decided to embrace my term as Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park as a kind of pilgrimage. Certainly, I would be covering a lot of ground delivering the project, and that has proved true, and fascinating. More significantly, I knew I would be on a personal […]