Ghachok village sprawls across a sloping plateau below Machapuchare – Fishtail Mountain – one of the most striking in Nepal. At the centre of the Annapurana range, the peak rises in a sharp triangle that has never been climbed, since a failed attempt in 1957 when it was declared sacred and out of bounds. The […]
A long time ago, I wanted to be an actress. (Or an acTOR, as I called myself at the time. ‘Actresses’ were either decorative fluff or the screen idols of a bygone era – not the serious performers we female drama students took ourselves to be.) So finishing up my Uni course in Melbourne I […]
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 […]
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 […]