The latest podcast from the postgraduate community at Aberdeen University’s School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture where I interview author Eden Unger Bowditch with fellow creative writer Jane Hughes.
Eden talks about her novel in progress Two-Hundred-and-Fifty Years at Home and her thesis Fields of Meaning which examines the role of ambiguity in the literary text. You can listen to it through clicking on the image above or find it on your preferred podcast platform.
With the long, cold month of January drawing to a close, we took a walk along the Aberdeenshire coast from the historic fishing town of Stonehaven just ten miles south of Aberdeen. It was still cold, but dry with little wind, the sea flat calm and the low sun of a northern winter’s afternoon casting its glow across the clifftops. The path climbs steadily upwards from Stonehaven’s harbour above the rocks and old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie, where tall poles once used to spread and dry the fishing nets still poke up awkwardly out of the communal green space like some ancient wooden henge.
We were making our way to an old Catholic chapel perched precariously high on the sandstone cliffs and once dedicated to the Pictish Saint Nathalan who is attributed to several of the early churches of Aberdeenshire. His treasure is said to have been buried wrapped in a bull’s hide somewhere between the old chapel and its outer wall. The extant building dates to the thirteenth-century – some six-hundred years after Saint Nathalan’s time – and is also known as the Chapel of Our Lady of the Storms, re-dedicated to Saint Mary in 1276. The ruins of Cowie Castle, built by the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore in the eleventh-century, are just a short distance to the south, passed as you approach the chapel from the direction of Stonehaven along the narrow clifftop path.
We spent half an hour or so wandering around the chapel’s burial ground as the sun sank steadily toward the fields. An old yew tree and holly tree take up much of the chapel’s roofless interior, and its stone arches catching the low winter sun in the stillness of the late afternoon created that eerie sense of time’s suspension. We found no treasure, but there are the gravestones of local fisherman lost at sea and a memorial commemorating a crew of lifeboatmen who drowned in the February of 1874. The sun finally dipped out of view and we made our way back along the cliffs, the old fisherman’s cottages at Cowie shrouded in deepening shadow and the waves just audible amongst the rocks below.
“Ian Grosz takes the reader on a journey, often on foot, to the half-hidden spiritual locales of the Don. Replete with historical and archaeological resonance, his journey through road, trail, stream and field is an elemental dance of often elusive elements. Spiritual faith as a palimpsest of earth, rock, water and culture remains a central theme as he leads us through histories of Gaelic saints, Pictish stones, cairns and Aberdeenshire stone circles with their distinctive recumbent stone. Places of transformation and spirituality are never far away from the divine river. The ancient goddess endures in a looping and recursive movement that exists differently from linear formulations of time and space.”
Neil Curtis and Jo Jones, Introduction, Four Rivers, Deep Maps, pp. 21-22.
The book Four Rivers: Deep Maps was published by UWAP and had an official launch early in Nov. There will be a second launch in the UK in the first quarter of 2023. The book has a diverse range of creative and scholarly responses to the two regions of Perth, WA, and Aberdeenshire. My own contribution is reviewed here by Neil Curtis in the book’s introduction:
UK stockists may be available next year, but if that’s piqued your interest, you can order the book directly from the publishers. Click on the image to go direct to UWAP for this and their other titles.
‘I can hear the distant sound of the ocean, smell the ozone in the air and feel the fine mist of salt-spray against my skin.’
A new short essay on The Clearing: A Journal of Nature, Landscape and Place published by Little Toller Books. The essay takes the reader to Luskentyre in southwest Harris in the Outer Hebrides, exploring its origins and the forces still at play there, set against the ever burgeoning problems of climate change. I visited Luskentyre during my winter residency with Island Darkroom back in February. The essay is a much abridged extract from a chapter in my longer work-in-progress that forms part of my PhD. Thanks go to Jon Woolcott for his expert editorial input, and to Little Toller for hosting such a great online journal. I hope you enjoy the essay’s evocation of Luskentyre’s sense of place and time, which you can read here.
Back in March 2022 I was invited to talk with Helen Needham of BBC Radio Scotland about place, about time, and my approach to the landscape. We took a walk up an often over-looked hill in Aberdeenshire that has been the focus and the start-point of my writing about landscape and how it shapes us. In this episode you can join us as we explore the hill and its histories, and listen to the conversation that resulted.
Download the podcast here.
Or you can listen to it on BBC Radio Sounds.
Groundings 