‘I was left breathless by the wind – and the view – and Lewis took on a suddenly different feel: an awe-inspiring island of sense and frightening clarity; a lost world of elements; a dreamed-of place caught between sea and sky.’
A new essay on The Clearing – Little Toller Books’ online journal of Nature, Landscape and Place.
‘Between Sea and Sky’ comes out of a research trip to Lewis back in 2022 and explores the changing land use on the islands. I met with a modern day crofter who, like many new generation crofters, is moving away from traditional crofting practices and using her land to plant native woodland instead of keeping livestock. She talked movingly about her experience relocating to and living on the islands, and of the deep connection she has found with the land.
I had a great stay on Lewis and wrote a lot about my time there – it was a homecoming of sorts – a return – having lived in Stornoway for a while back in the mid-noughties. It’s not an easy place to live, especially as an incomer, but it’s a place I keep going back to.
Thanks as ever to editor Jon Woolcott and to crofter Susanne Erbida for taking time to meet with me during my visit.
You can read the essay through the link below. I’d love to hear what you think of it.
Aberdeen’s Castlegate – Image and Copyright Steve Smith
Our relationships with place are nearly always expressed through story, and this is what fascinates me most about what it is that makes a place, a place – the unique community stories that come out of any given location.
For the last 9 months I’ve been working on a pilot project commissioned by Aberdeen City Council through Historic Env. Scotland’s Heritage and Place Programme. The project aims to celebrate, record, and reveal the historic and contemporary stories that make up the Castlegate’s unique sense of place in the east end of Aberdeen city centre, and to capture the social history of the area at a time when the city is on the cusp of change.
I ran a series of community-based workshops exploring local heritage and relationships with place, and, working alongside the project photographer, conducted audio-recorded interviews to capture a sample of individual experiences relating to the Castlegate and its heritage.
We opened an exhibition at Aberdeen Arts Centre to showcase some of the photography for those who feature in the project, and we worked with artist and filmmaker Callum Kellie and a digital surveying and software company to launch an interactive online platform and digital map to house some of the material gathered, which you can explore at the link below.
We’ve only scratched the surface, but we hope we’ll have opportunity to build on the work done so far to capture a sense of a city that is both informed by its past and working hard to rewrite its future.
‘I try to imagine being stuffed into the cages shoulder-to-shoulder with a crowd of men in a duplicate cage above, the rock face racing by inches beyond the open frame as we descend into the mine, leaving the world of light and fresh air behind for a seven-hour shift over half a kilometre underground.’
‘From the Ground, Light’, Hinterland Issue 14, pp. 90-109, p.96.
As COP 28 comes to a close I’m proud to be among the contributors of Hinterland 14 – a climate writing special with wonderful cover art by Nature and Wildlife photographer Tashi R. Ghale, guest edited by Iona Macduff and featuring an interview with author of Marginlands Arita Kumar-Rao.
From the editors:
“Climate change has become a constant presence in our lives, and increasingly inflects our writing. Yet, actively writing about climate change is not easy. The contributors of this Climate Writing special issue have risen to the challenge, whether it’s writing about forest fires in New Mexico, frogs in Australia, rivers in Manchester, or the effects of human activity and the Anthropocene.”
My own contribution ‘From the Ground, Light’ explores the mining heritage of my hometown through the re-landscaped mining grounds of Sutton Manor Colliery and the experiences of a former miner. It reflects on our complex relationships with the landscape and the heritage of our industrial past, but also on the impacts of climate change, our ongoing reliance on fossil fuels, and our failure to transition to green energy.
Also featuring work from Alison Baxter, Joe Fenn, Tamsin Grainger, David Howe, Rita Issa, Clara Kubler, Wendy Johnson, Iona Macduff, Meg Mooney, Millie Prosser and Joe Shute, with photography by Tashie R. Ghale
“We came in the afternoon to Slanes Castle, built upon the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, the foot of which is beaten by the waves. To walk round the house seemed impracticable. From the windows the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence must enjoy all the terrifick grandeur of the tempestuous ocean.I would not for my amusement wish for a storm; but as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should willingly look out upon them from Slanes Castle.’
So mused Samuel Johnson who passed this way with his friend and travel companion, James Boswell, in the late summer of 1773 on their journey through Scotland to the Western Isles. Johnson’s account of the trip became the famous A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, later followed by Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which brings the irascible Johnson joyfully to life. This being two-hundred-and-fifty-years since their passage through Aberdeenshire on their circuitous route westward, I felt compelled to visit the castle today.
Johnson doesn’t mention staying there, the castle then under the care of the Count of Errol, but he and Boswell spent the night at Slains after an excursion along the coast. It must have been opulently appointed in its day, but it’s a bleak and desolate ruin overlooking the cliffs now, the wind rushing through its empty corridors and doorless openings straight off the sea.
‘I had a most elegant room,’ Boswell writes: ‘but there was a fire in it which blazed: and the sea, to which my windows looked, roared: and the pillows were made with the feathers of some sea-fowl, which had to me a disagreeable smell: so that, by all these causes, I was kept awake a good while.’
In his half-waking, fitful sleep, he imagines the ghost of Lord Kilmarnock who had married into the Erroll title and was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746 for his part in the Jacobite uprising. Wandering around the castle’s old halls and passageways, I couldn’t help but think of what other ghosts it might be host to.
The original thirteenth-century castle, a fortress built by the Comyn family five miles further along the coast to the south, was forfeited after the Battle of Barra in 1308 to the Hay family after the defeat of the Earl of Buchan, John Comyn, whose troops scattered and fled from the battlefield when Bruce himself appeared waving his standard. The new castle was built in the sixteenth century by Francis Hay, the ninth Earl of Errol, and grew from its original tower house into a Baronial style mansion. At the time of Johnson and Boswell’s visit it was still in the title of the Erroll line, but was sold in 1916 by the twentieth earl, whose finances, following previous generations of lavish spending and an agricultural recession, couldn’t maintain the upkeep.
The castle is most famous today for hosting Bram Stoker in the early part of the twentieth century, who would holiday regularly in nearby Cruden Bay and was thought to have been inspired by its setting. It’s certainly dramatic, and with the tail end of Storm Agnes still bringing the spray up over the rocks and flinging the crows from the castle turrets, I spent some time watching the waves crashing into the cliffs from a window at the northern end of the ruins. I could almost feel Johnson’s breath on me. ‘Well, sir!’ he seemed to be saying. ‘What did I tell you?!’
Later, walking along the cliffs, I watched a solitary cormorant surfing the air between the waves, its dark aquiline shape momentarily vanishing behind crests in the swell. I wondered if it relished a storm, and whether Johnson’s ghost was watching too, looking out from one of the windows in the castle’s now empty rooms.
‘I set off an hour before sunrise. It is still dark: very dark, and I can see very little beyond the dim circle of light from my head torch. The thick scent of pine fills the air as I start up the trail. The presence of trees, melting into the darkness either side of me, are felt rather than seen; the still, almost-full harvest moon having disappeared into the cover of pine branches. A nervous glance behind reveals the comfort of a slowly brightening sky, suffused with faint orange and aquamarine banding toward the rim of an unseen eastern horizon. Amidst gaps in the canopy above, bright and brittle stars vanish and reappear. The tree cover opens a little and the moon’s glow pulls me upward.’
As the Autumn equinox approaches, here in the Northern Hemisphere, I am drawn back to our local hill and this moment from a couple of years ago when I climbed to one of its summits to witness the equinox sunrise. The short essay I wrote about it was published on The Clearing: Little Toller’s online journal of Nature, Landscape and Place. You can read the full piece here, or by clicking on the image above.
Traditionally marking the second harvest, a time to gather in the bounty of late summer signalled by the full moon, the Autumn equinox can also be a time of balance, of reset: a chance to take stock before the long slide into winter. Wishing you all a moment of balance as we begin our journey toward the darkness of the winter months.
Groundings 