I feel very lucky to have spent a couple of days earlier this month at Elmley Nature Reserve on a small writing commission.
Such a wonderful reserve – an island haven for nature on Sheppey, fringed by industry and urban development. But it’s a place of distant horizons and big skies, amazing insect, bird and plant life, and fascinating history.
I’ve been writing about hares and the Bronze Age, an abandoned Victorian school and its resident Little Owls, elm trees and Elmley Hill, the Mesolithic and medicinal meadows – all for an illustrated booklet alongside 3 other writers to help visitors connect with the reserve, its habitats and wildlife. There was so much to try to capture and contain and lots of notes to go through, but I’m looking forward to seeing the final results, including illustrations by the wonderful Kate Winter.
It’s a long journey to-from rural Aberdeenshire but worth it. It’s not often we get chance to connect with nature in such an immersive way, and to be spoiled by the kind of hospitality shown to me during my visit. If you’re ever visiting the busy SE, do take time to include the reserve – some of our rarest species hang on there, all with the support of the staff who have turned Elmley into the refuge it has become.
I’ll be posting links up to the finished booklet / micro-stories when the project concludes.
The latest Paperboats Writers podcast was released on Friday May 02 with artist and writer Christina Riley.
Christina was born in Florida but moved to Ayrshire when she was eight years old. Her practice often focuses on the small details of the natural world, particularly in coastal and underwater environments, and incorporates collections and found objects.
In 2019, Christina started The Nature Library – a roving library of books aimed at connecting people to land, sky and sea, which in 2024 took up a long-term location at a former shipyard worker’s flat in Irvine in Ayrshire in association with the Scottish Maritime Museum. Her photo book The Beach Today was published by Guillemot Press in 2021, and her debut collection of essays was longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing in 2019.
Christina reads two extracts from her series of beautiful prose fragments, ‘The Same Sunlight’, published by Gutter Magazine, Issue 30. She discusses her residency at the Mission Blue Argyll ‘Hope Spot’, and the remarkable biodiversity that can be found along the Argyll coast. She also gives a fascinating insight into her writing, her artistic practice, and the books that have inspired her.
Christina is currently working on a series of essays exploring Scotland’s biodiversity, stemming from her time on the artist residency in Argyll.
Half-forgotten standing stones, abandoned farm houses, early blossom, late daffodils – trees that always transport me to elsewheres.
All way-markers of the passage of time and the signatures of place.
It always gently surprises me how much walking connects me to place – the sense of time and connection to those that have gone before us – and to other places through memory and imagination.
I’ve been walking this area for years, now, but it still rewards me. As I walk, I remake the path and the path, in turn, remakes me, directing my movements through the landscape, shaping the way I experience it and reaffirming where and who I am.
To reach any destination, we must first place ourselves in an imagined future. To go somewhere we have already been, we place the self in both an imagined future and the reconstructed past. We experience the past, the present and the future simultaneously, creatures bound by time but able to traverse its different states, merging the self of the past, the present and the future in a continuous state of reinvention and renewal. In this way, wayfaring is a collaboration, an act of co-creation between the wayfarer and the way.
Pleasing, then, to see the signs of spring, the decay and the new life – the little changes we can witness in a landscape – and to feel truly grateful to be here, anchored by the things that give me my place in the world.
In 2022 I took a walk up everybody’s favourite hill in Aberdeebnshire to witness the autumn equinox sunrise from the summit of Mither Tap – the site of a Pictish hill fort that dominated what was, for the Picts, a sacred landscape.
I wrote an essay about the walk, exploring what the idea of a sacred landscape might mean to us today, which was published on The Clearing – Little Toller’s online journal of Nature, Landscape and Place.
Here I return to the hill as the autumn equinox approached, in the company of BBC Radio Broadcaster Helen Needham. We talk about our connection to landscape and place, and the importance of taking time out from our busy lives to pause and to reflect, and to notice the changing of the seasons.
Extracts from my essay are woven through the recording Helen made as we walked up the hill, following the Maiden Causeway – an ancient track leading to the Pictish fort on the summit of Mither Tap.
You can listen to the podcast here or click on the image above.
Shorelines are places of ambiguity and exchange – they connect land and sea, places with other places, often far beyond the horizon. They intermingle different zones, habitats, moods, elements, memories. Where does the sea end and the land begin? How do we relate to the shoreline? What does the shore say to us as we negotiate our lives?
I ran a workshop revolving around these themes with a group of writers based in Stonehaven on the Aberdeenshire coast at the weekend. The group is run by poet and short-story writer Alistair Lawrie, who invited me to come along. Alistair evokes place in his work through the use of Doric – a Scot’s dialect that is unique to the northeast of Scotland.
I was keen to draw on the particulars of place in the workshop by focussing on Stonehaven’s shoreline to highlight how it could be a launching point into wider themes, and to encourage new writing. We talked about form and process, and the value of close observation.
Observations can provide the raw material that we write from – the clay that we later mould into shape, and can be used to enrich the context of our work, whether through setting in a story, or enriching poetry and essay with concrete detail. This use of closely observed detail is something the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’ as it pertained to its use in making field notes during research, but as writers, we can draw from the same principal.
We looked at three pieces of writing that relate to the shoreline by writers who incorporate carefully and closely observed detail into their work, both with constraint and in celebration of a richly descriptive poetic form: Kathleen Jamie’s essay ‘Links of Notland’ in Surfacing, Martin Malone’s opening to his long poem sequence Gardenstown, and ‘The morning Swim’ in Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book.
If you haven’t read all these works yet, I can recommend them, both for how writers can use observation and place as a ‘way in’ to broader and more universal themes – whether that’s the idea of deep time in Kathleen Jamie’s narrative essay, Martin Malone’s exploration of climate change and ecological collapse in the quotidian details of his life in Gamrie, or the cycles of life and death in Jansson’s classic island tale told through the lens of a grandmother’s relationship with her granddaughter – and just as fantastic reads that should be read for simple pleasure alone. All of them ‘form’ favourites of mine, if you’ll excuse the pun…
We took these pieces of writing as our starting point and then explored the shoreline. The tide was out and the rocks were exposed a little way offshore, the memory of waves retained in the undulations of the pebble beach, and the record of the winter storms still scattered in neat bands parallel to the shore. People found inspiration in the stones, in the time they held, in the hushing of the low waves and in the calmness and stillness and presence of the sea. They also found inspiration in the life of a busy beachfront on a mild Sunday afternoon: part of the long story of life here – endless, as one person remarked.
The time spent outside – observing, writing, noticing details – reflecting on what the shoreline might say to us – creating space to imagine that conversation – was very productive; and later, after we’d spent time writing and then had some soup, the range of responses were wonderful. They reflected the lives of each individual writer, and all of life, in those moments we had carved out for ourselves.
Writing is often seen as an activity confined to a desk and a chair carried out by a lone thinker in a room, but coming together as writers, taking time to notice the world around us in all its contradiction and rich detail, is sometimes the most fertile ground. Shorelines in particular are rich metaphors for a range of themes more human than we might at first imagine. Spending time there will always reward a writer with the patience to look closely, and in those smallest of details, we might find ourselves tackling surprisingly big questions.
For a fantastic read on noticing and writing that draws on the outdoors, see Linda Cracknell’s In The Moment: Writing Landscape(Saraband, 2023).
Groundings 