Books, Borders, Bikes

The 'Books, Borders, Bikes' festival running for the first time at the gorgeous Traquair House in the Borders on 14th and 15th August is getting me excited. It brings together so many of my passions: land, walking, cycling and international exchange. I've been invited to appear with Raja Shehadeh, whose writings, particularly about walking, identity and land issues ('Palestinian Walks') I've long admired, and his insightful piece on walking in the Scottish Highlands appeared in 'A Wilder Vein' which I edited last year.

The organising body, 'Beyond Borders', is 'an international art consortium dedicated to showcasing the work of writers, intellectuals, artists and filmmakers who come from small nations around the world. Beyond Borders aims to offer a platform for artists from similar smaller nations to explore common themes and experiences, especially in relation to those nations and peoples who are or have been caught up in conflict.' And they are working with Scottish PEN, hence my involvement at Traquair.

You can find the programme here.

Cavalcades, processions, choreography

Groups of people moving through the land in semi-organised ways, has become a bit of a theme over the last week or so.

Raja Shehadeh wrote in last Saturday’s Guardian about taking 48 international writers for a hill walk north west of Ramallah as part of the second Palestine Festival of Literature (the third starts today). If the very existence of the festival is sticking a neck out, the walk represented a challenge in a place where Palestinians ‘have no control over time and space’ and driving ‘a mere 20 mile journey might consume a whole day’. The hilltop watchtowers, the blockage of ancient routes by new Israeli settlements and checkpoints, meant this group walk was not just an exploration, but an act of solidarity, confirming of an old order by the laying of footprints; a protest of sorts.

His piece also includes beautiful insights into the geophysical and human origins of the paths: ‘the land is like an open book on which nature and humans continuously write.’

The frustration, threat of violent encounter, lack of freedom to roam, contrasts with Hamish Fulton's latest walking project, written up in the Scotsman last week. He’s currently on a 21 day walk in the Cairngorms, making the plan up as the days go by, with no commitment except to arrive at Glenmore Lodge at the end of it. The Cairngorms are considered one of Europe's last wildernesses, and thus provide the 'Room to Roam' that he seeks both mentally and physically. The journey itself is the piece of art.

Before he set off from Huntly he choreographed a walk for 30 or so people, a silent procession lapping the same block in single file with a two meter distance between each person. He'll be leading something similar at Glenmore Lodge on 9th May.

For 40 years he's made works of art relating to walking. He makes no interventions in the landscape as Richard Long does, but produces minimalist responses, often in text. He's walked for Tibetan Freedom and to the summit of Everest.

His choreographed walks are a new departure and brought to mind another spectacular procession which will happen on Glasgow Green on 29th May. 111 bicycles will dance ‘A breeze’, a piece choreographed by Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel. Part of a much bigger project about ‘Dummy Jim’, a deaf and dumb man who cycled to the Arctic Circle in 1951, who has two Glasgow musicians cycling in his tracks this summer.

In July this year I'll be walking some old roads in the Cairngorms myself. This time I’ll not be alone, but in company with fellow walkers who are part of Speygrian. Poets, artists, educators, ecologists, adventurers, a band of us will be travelling with pack ponies. I imagine our cavalcade like a pilgrimage party, noisy with story and shared incident, ragged and un-choreographed, but strung together by joint purpose. I will report back.

A Wilder Vein back from the printers

What a delight it has been to receive the anthology that I've edited hot of the press from Two Ravens Press. Although publication date is 2nd November, it's for sale before then from their website ONLY at the great price of £8.99, for delivery from 1st October. This not only gives the reader a good deal, but is good news for this small press who are severely challenged by the commercial discounts required by many booksellers.

This is a quality book - looks good, feels gorgeous and packed with diverse and beautifully written responses to the wild places of Britain and Ireland. It includes the extended version of Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh's piece, pre-published in The Guardian in July. It's very gratifying to see so much work by so many going out to make its way in the book world. Please help it on its way!

Launch events at The Aberfeldy Watermill, Tuesday 27th October with Andrew Greig, Mandy Haggith, Alison Grant and Kenny Taylor; and as part of the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair on Thursday 29th October with readings by Judith Thurley, Ken Wilkie, Andrew Greig and Jane Alexander.

Raja Shehadeh - A Wilder Vein

As A Wilder Vein, the anthology of 'wild places' writing that I've been editing is prepared for print, I'm delighted to see a shorter version of the piece Raja Shehadeh has written for it in today's Travel Guardian. He reflects on his first visit to the Scottish Highlands when he found the landscape muted in colour and water-saturated in comparison to his often bone-dry native Palestinian hills. However he found powerful echoes in the histories of displacement and the memories left in each terrain.

In this anthology ‘Wildness’ is applied to these islands in terms of each writer's sensibility. It might be a sense of scale or remoteness from roads, solitude, or a perception of surroundings that are natural or unchanging in comparison to human life cycles. That the idea is different for each of us is interesting in its own right. But history, memory, and the impact of the way that landscapes are seen animate the writings as visibly as the lines of river, stream and contour on the map. The pages are haunted by thousands of years of human activity which have formed our cultural landscapes, landscapes marked by tools or stones, by remnants of buildings.

The contributions of poets, travel-writers, natural historians, anthropologists and novelists give us many ways of looking, and varieties of writing. Amongst the pages there is lyricism and humour, biography and memoir, celebration and elegy. Perspectives come from inhabitants of these places, from visitors to them, and from travellers from other natural and political contexts like Raja Shehadeh who find echoes of or distinctions from home.

A Wilder Vein also includes writings by Sara Maitland, Andrew Greig, Margaret Elphinstone, Gerry Loose, Mandy Haggith, Neil Hegarty, Lisa Samson, Alison Grant, Lesley Harrison, Marco Daane, Katharine Macrae, Michelle Cotter, Ken Wilkie, Kenneth Taylor, Jane Alexander, Judith Thurley, Susan Richardson and with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane.

Published 2nd November

Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh

A Spanish landscape shaped by terracing and cultivation methods common to the hills of Palestine

‘…People should be encouraged to walk in the hills. It will increase their attachment to their country.’ Words spoken by Palestinian writer, lawyer, walker Raja Shehadeh, in conversation with a Palestinian Governor, who is trying to persuade him hill-walking is too dangerous after Shehadeh has been caught in a shooting incident in the valley just behind his house.

We might say something similar about encouragement to walk in the benign hills of Britain where the worst you might fear is the guns of deer or grouse shooters, never likely to be aimed at walkers in harassment. As access to our hills becomes enshrined in law, access to land on foot by Palestinians is shrinking and distorted by the building of walls, Jewish settlements, roads, prohibitions and a general sense of danger.

Palestinian Walks is a sad, sometimes embittered account, of the frustrated link between walking the land and belonging. With powerful evocations of the political situation and the spectacular, loved beauty of the hills which contain for the writer his past, his culture, his sense of freedom as a walker and a civilian, there is a terrible sense of erosion of this link we ourselves take for granted. The book records a series of walks through a ‘vanishing landscape’ over a 26 year period which chart the developments in one man’s relationship to the land and to his country through the redrawing of maps, the collision of two versions of history.

A walking book like no other I know. It demonstrates what a serious matter walking in the land close to our own homes can be.