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 […]
On May 1st I got this email: “I am putting together a collection of poems and short prose by children’s authors in Scotland for ebook publication. Titled Stay at Home! Poems and Prose for Children by Authors Living in Scotland – it will help children come to terms with the changes we are experiencing under […]
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 […]
A month ago I was in Nepal. The month since has been the most tumultuous in my living memory as the world has struggled to come to grips with the coronavirus. But at the same time, for me personally, it has become one of the quietest months as the dear friends who were sharing our […]
My head is still in the Himalayas. Two weeks ago, I shared about my childhood in Ghachok, a village in the mountains of Nepal which is home to the Gurung people. We left it in 1976, and over the years, have made several trips back. This is the story of those returns. The first one […]
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-west 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 […]