My new book - a dry stone dyke tells its story

My second pocket book is out this week, with a stony cover to chime visually with ‘Whiter than White’, and inside pages illustrated with line drawings. ‘The Beat of Heart Stones’ celebrates a Highland Perthshire landmark - an extraordinary dry-stone dyke that climbs two miles in a straight line towards the summit of Schiehallion. I find it hard to claim it as either fiction or non-fiction, but a walker who falls into step with the wall gets to hear its story.

Dry stone walling dates back at least three and a half millennia, to the village of Skara Brae in Orkney, and the Iron Age brochs of northern and western Scotland. The Perthshire dyke probably dates from the early nineteenth century and marks a very old boundary line. My eye has always been drawn up the dyke from the road under Schiehallion’s northern side. It has a monumental place in the landscape, striking upwards over steep and undulating ground. Eventually I walked its length, and began to think about the artistry of the people who built it, and what it might have witnessed in two centuries of standing there. That’s when I started to ‘hear’ the voice of the wall! More about the project can be found by clicking on the ‘dyke’ label.

‘The Beat of Heart Stones’ by Linda Cracknell, best foot books,
ISBN 978-0-9562453-1-1, £4. Available from The Aberfeldy Watermill, some other local outlets, and direct from my website for £4 inc p&p.

The suppleness of stone

Also been having a bit of fun trying to capture 'my wall' in ink....

lines in the land

I'm playing with some visuals in preparation for putting my Schiehallion dyke walk (an extract is published on page 26 here) into a small lovely, book form, and have got so excited about seeing it stretch through the land in these tweaked photos. Why?

John Muir Trust and wild writing

Last Wednesday myself and co-judge Hamish MacDonald announced the winners of the John Muir Trust's wild writing competition at Fort William's fantastic Mountain Festival. It's the third year I've been involved in some capacity and the way that JMT has joined the Festival in developing a creative response to mountains and wild places in our lives has been fantastic and creates more and more interest each year.

For the full results, see here but Tom Bryan of Kelso was the overall winner with a beautiful reflection on his relationship with Suilven, the iconic Assynt mountain that follows one's eye, shape-shifting as it goes, around that part of north-west Scotland. Alan Gay of North Berwick took second place with a mysterious poem called 'Deer Path' which for me made the visible and invisible worlds of the mountains touch for a moment. There were three runners up - all prose pieces - from Kate Blackadder, Stephen Busby and Jenny Holden.

Joyce Carol Oates criticised 'nature writing' for what she called its "painfully limited set of responses: reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness." We may have found those responses amongst the entries but we also found exhilaration, confusion, boredom, coldness, joy and grief.

Congratulations to all!

Meanwhile, if you get hold of a copy of the latest JMT journal (46/Spring 2009) you will find an illustrated extract of my piece 'The Beat of Heart Stones' about a walk along a dry stone dyke on Schiehallion this time last year.

March Conversation

Dyke! Have you any idea how long you have lured my eye along your length up to the famous summit of Schiehallion? – a magnet for those of us for whom lines in the land are like a fishing reel. You’re a tease – do you know that? I’ll bet you do, all one and a half miles of you snaking with the land, insisting on your twenty six degrees SSE up the north face.

Twenty seven.

Sorry?
And here, out of the trees, they chose a new type of rock for you – black rather than glittering grey. As if it hasn’t seen the light for years.

Six. Hundred. Million.

Eh? That sounded like a yawn.

If you insist on waking me, prattling on and on. I was saying, you’d need your snorkel six hundred million years ago to see the deep beginnings of that vertebra you touch. Before it was ossified into this scaly mosaic.

You were underwater?

I was a forest of sea lilies then, wafting their tendrils in the currents.

Oh.

Limestone. Dug from that hollow over there. The scars are grassed over now. It’s only a patch, an outcrop, floated down from the limestone pavements. Walk me a bit further and you’ll see how I return to what you call silver rock. I’m the earth turned inside out – a display of what ever’s under the turf.

They used whatever was close by?

Would you want to heave it far across the hills? Forgive me, but you don’t look very strong.

Looks can be…

It was weans and women and tinkers hauled these rocks – a heap each side of the line where they were working, building my long slow uphill spine..

They carried rocks for who?

One craftsman each side. Raising two inward-leaning walls that kissed just before they were capped. Think of the men as you walk - quick-handed, with eyes that could measure. They saw at a glance how one stone would nudge and slide against another.

I see that. Here, where there are big square straight-edged blocks at your feet. But halfway up, a massive wave-shaped rock that it must have taken two to lift into place. And around it the small flat rocks that pack against its curves, insisting on the horizontal lines again around this non-conformity. It’s like art.

They made it a rule – never pick a stone up more than once. Assess them where they lie.

A waste of effort?

If you’re being paid by the yard.

What were they like?

Men with fat fingers.

Black thumbnails?

Your fingers look slim and weak.

Look how I stride along next to you though, as you ride the waves of the land. Why on earth don’t you go around these hillocks?

I’m a march boundary.

Continued....