Merryn was born in Kathmandu to Australian missionary parents and grew up in Nepal, India and Pakistan. She settled in Scotland after travelling around the world and was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park in 2019. She co-hosts the Cairngorms-based Storyland Sessions with musician Hamish Napier, and is a regular Guardian Country Diary columnist. Her latest book is The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd (Polygon, 2023).
In this episode Merryn describes her early life in Nepal and India, the deep connection she has found with the Cairngorms through her writing, her involvement with the Storyland Sessions community project, and her time as Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park. Merryn also reads from The Hidden Fires, and gives an insight into how her spiritual faith informs her thinking on Nature and the Environment.
Head into the Cairngorms from your armchair, or wherever you like to listen, and stream from your chosen platform.
‘The screeching increased, and we found the terns now hovering above our heads: dark, piercing eyes glaring down at us, the flash of razored wings folding in on themselves in a sudden flurry of air and feathers as they dove to drive us off. We stumbled on, wary of our footsteps and continually harried by the terns. Eventually we came across a half-collapsed stone dyke and ducked down behind it, leaving the mass of screaming birds behind and feeling guilty for our intrusion.’
Very happy to have some new writing back on THE CLEARING.
It stems from a trip to Orkney in the summer where I had an encounter with an arctic tern colony, and reflects on the draw of the islands and the potential negative impacts of tourism on Orkney’s wildlife.
THE CLEARING is a journal of landscape, nature and place published by Little Toller based in Dorset and edited by Jon Woolcott, author of Real Dorset.
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.
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.
“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.
Groundings 