Cover Reveal!

Coming September 2022 from UWA Publishing: a creative and critical engagement with place that crosses hemispheres and challenges typical perceptions of two often overlooked regions. 

It’s been a long time in the making, a journey that began back in the summer of 2019. We all know what happened shortly afterwards but really happy to see the project come to fruition: a collaboration between writers, poets, artists and academic researchers to create a deep map of four rivers: the Derbari Yerrigan (Swan) and Dyarlgarro Beeliar (Canning) rivers in southwest Australia, and the Don and Dee rivers in northeast Scotland, weaving narratives of place across seemingly disparate regions of the world into a thoughtful, provoking and surprising engagement with landscape. 

My own contribution charts the river Don through time, revealing how its once sacred associations during the Neolithic, Pictish and early medieval periods still shape the region today. 

Looking forward to its release this September. 

Edited by Dr. Jo Jones with Neil Curtis. 

Follow @uwapublishing for details of this and their other titles.

On Gallow’s Down

I had to share the latest post on The Clearing by Nicola Chester, introducing a what looks to be a really interesting and thought provoking series of responses to the themes of her book On Gallow’s Down, which I haven’t read but now must, having read Nicola’s introduction. This feels particularly important right now, encompassing themes that have been the preoccupations of my own work: belonging without exclusion, the meaning of home and place, and our relationship with the landscape and the natural world. I hope you’ll check it out, with some wonderful writers engaging with this series.

Place, Protest and Belonging – Nicola Chester.

Wind and Tide

I looped round Harris before another storm blew through, chasing echoes from the past: old saints and their stories; old places filled with memory, fleeting shadows from another time. Losgaintir shone with a cold brilliance against its ancient hills. Time slept, dreaming the ocean, its voice lost to the wind without echo or meaning. I drove back through a landscape of splintered rock as old as the earth, leaving the beach and its impossible confluence behind.

Good Company

It was so great to be a part of the launch event for Echtrai Edition One hosted by Helen Needham last night and to hear the wonderful writing of the other contributors. ‘My Father’s Hands’ by Jeff Young is a tender portrait of a father, a husband and an honest working man: a beautiful piece of writing with universal resonance. If you haven’t read Jeff’s book Ghost Town published by Little Toller yet, then you must.

So many other wonderful contributors in this volume of new writing including poet and artist Alec Finlay and writer and editor Jon Woolcott of Little Toller; the weird and wonderful prose of novelist David Gladwin; the poetry of David Wheatley and the American composer Akira Rabelais; writing by the editors, artist Emily Hesse and academic Martyn Hudson; liminal travels on the Inca trail by travel and nature writer Louise Kenward; a haunting piece about the relics of a city in childhood memory and a never-built ‘garden city’ by Italian writer, gallery owner and antique dealer Belinda Guerriero; the wonderful artwork of Guy Dickinson, poet and artist Camilla Nelson, and the ethereal incantations of the journal’s founder and creative director Baz Nichols under his pen-name Bran Graeme Nairne, along with many other equally compelling writers and their work.

If you couldn’t make the launch which sold out, you can order a copy through AnMór Studio in the links embedded in this post.

Sacred Mountain


‘I become only breath; movement; the sound of my feet crunching along the trail, vaguely aware of the dawn chasing behind me.’

Along with Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, a publication that I have followed and admired for a long time is The Clearing edited by Jon Woolcott of Little Toller Books, an online journal of nature, landscape and place and a natural home for my interests, so I’m really pleased to have a piece feature.

‘Sacred Mountain’ takes the reader on a walk to the summit of an iconic hill that defines my local landscape to watch the Autumn Equinox sunrise, exploring notions of the sacred and what it might mean to us. You can read ‘Sacred Mountain’ HERE.