Scottish history

The Weight of Quiet Things

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It’s great to see this anthology come into the world and to have a contributing essay within its pages.

Published by the wonderful Arkbound UK,’The Weight of Quiet Things gathers essays, stories and poems that explore the deep, enduring relationship between the Scottish landscape and its people.’ Edited by Bridget Reaume, this is a collection ‘about what we take from the land, what the land takes from us and the weight of what remains.’

My essay ‘A Bridge to Nowhere: Land Use and Misuse on the Isle of Lewis’ comes out of a return visit to the Isle of Lewis where I lived for a time in the early noughties. As an incomer, I wanted to understand more about the island’s history and culture, and how the legacies of the past continue to shape its identity today. An abandoned bridge project spearheaded by Lord Leverhulme as part of his ambitious plans to commercialise the islands in the years following WWI seemed emblematic of both the misplaced good intentions of the outsider and the spirit of the islanders themselves. 

The collection is published in April but you can order ahead at the presale link below:

The Weight of Quiet Things Presale

Tree Talk

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Looking forward to giving an online talk and reading from my essay ‘elm is me and I am elm’ at Plymouth State University this Friday – part of the Museum of the White Mountains Tree Talk series.

‘elm is me and I am elm’ was published in Issue 5 of the Paperboats Writers E-Zine and explores our deeply entwined relationship with nature through a personal exploration of a local area of ancient woodland, the story of the wych-elm, and recent thinking in anthropology and ecology.

Join me on Friday 17th November for a human-nature entanglement.

Details here.

New Essay Published on THE CLEARING

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‘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.

Between Sea and Sky

Talking About Old Stones

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I had the very real privilege of presenting a paper at The Lithic Gathering organised by the wonderful Scholars of the Stones research group on Friday May 16.

There was a truly inspiring range of multidisciplinary responses, covering ritualistic practices, sensory investigation through sound, film and haptic interpretation, the reframing of narratives surrounding sacred stone structures, and artistic and aesthetic reframing through storytelling and architecture.

Drawing on work in post-processual and cognitive archaeology, my own paper – ’This is Our Place: Narrative and Interpretation at the Callanish Standing Stones’ explored the different narratives and interpretations surrounding the complex at Calanais on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, suggesting that the monuments are a product of cosmological modelling as well as local identity.

A symposium is always a temporary community bringing different scholars and practitioners together through shared themes, but this felt like something broader and deeper – a day as much about time and connection and empathy as it was about stone. It was great to feel among friends and to play a small part in such a thought provoking day.

The Lithic Gathering is part of The Stones Project at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy’s School of Gothic Studies and is led by Dr Fiona Barber with Drs Beccy Kennedy-Shtyk, Hannah Singleton and Martha Lineham.

elm is me and I am elm

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“Where do the trees end and I begin? Where is the boundary between tree, roots, soil, air, my breathing and thinking and being? It is not just a hippy idea of ‘oneness’, this, a flaky new age folksy feeling that yes, we are all connected, but an intellectual, phenomenological and objective reality. Everything really is whole within the multitudinous, messy complexity of everything.”

An extract from my essay ‘elm is me and I am elm’ in the Paperboats Zine, Issue 5, released for Earth Day 2025.

The essay explores our deep entanglements with Nature through the presence, folklore and mythology of the wych elm, and reconsiders the false boundaries between the human and non-human worlds. It goes on to ask how we might incorporate the interrelationships we have with Nature in our thinking and planning, bringing in ideas found in ecology and more radical urban design.

I first wrote about the wych elm here on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

Issue 5 of the Paperboats Zine as a whole is on the theme of ‘Our Power – Our Planet’ and is edited by Polly Pullar and Linda Cracknell.

‘Power is addressed in the repercussions of our energy choices, but also in humans working together for common good and in sometimes relinquishing control so other species and habitats can flourish.’

The editors, Paperboats Zine Issue 5.

There is a fantastic range of writing in this issue, by some wonderful writers, with words from:

Margaret Elphinstone, Jonathan Clark, Hayli McClain, Charlie Gracie, Rebecca Stonehill, Anthony McCluskey, Lesley Harrison, Aidan Semmens, Victoria NicIomhair, Donald S Murray, Iona Macduff, Jeff Skinner, Craig Dobson, Angela Gilchrist, Joshua Adam Walker, Owen Gallagher, Kat Hill, Chris Cottom & Sarah Wallis.

Head to Paperboats.org/zine to read this and previous issues.