'Cleave' - New Writing by Women in Scotland

A section of my non-fiction piece 'The Dogs' Route' about walking a drove road last September appears in this new anthology from Two Ravens Press (a Scottish newcomer attracting significant attention). Intended as a cross-genre record of what it is to be a woman in Scotland in 2008, there is a great diversity of forms and names including Jackie Kay and Dilys Rose. Launched in Borders, Glasgow on June 12th, I wish the anthology well and am pleased to have my first non-fiction 'walking' piece, about the joys of chance encounters, female-ness embedded in land and stone (see above), and the meaning of ageing, included in such a book, already available direct from the publishers.

'Riprap' by Gary Snyder

Thanks go to the Solitary Walker for drawing my attention to this wonderful poem . With its association of words with rocks with planets and paths, it seems to bring together many of my recent preoccupations whilst walking - following old forgotten crafted walls, touching worn slate stiles, and laying words to try and evoke and celebrate places and journeys.

working pathways

This set of steps, built in 1792 into a vertical 250 foot cliff face at Whaligoe, seven miles south of Wick in Caithness, has seen hard service. With a step for every day of the year, they zig-zag down to an otherwise inaccessible fishing station. Women carried the catch up the steps in baskets, for removal on foot to the markets of Wick, or it was cured below and collected by schooner. They returned down the steps to thread the bait, or to bring bottles of hot tea for a crew that had to go straight out again, or to collect cargo. Luckily they were sturdy, and said to be as strong as the men.

One of my favourite stories about the women of Whaligoe concerns a Dunbeath crew left in bitterly cold water after their boat hit rocks in 1870. Rescued in the final stages of hypothermia by a Whaligoe boat, the men were carried into the salt house. The women who had been waiting there for their own boats, revived every man by stripping them of their wet clothes, taking off their own, and laying with them.

Having recently tackled cliff steps on the Cornish coast path which seemed designed for a giant only able to move in a straight line, I found these steps remarkable for their moderate sashays to and fro which made climbing and descending a breeze. It seems that when paths are made for working as well as walking, such as the Spanish Mozarabic trails designed for loaded farmers, they are both durable and kind on your body.

Here's another one - a mule path through the extraordinary rock sculpture park that nature has made between Piana and Ota in Corsica. A delight to walk.

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....

Crooked Ways and Stiles of Stone

In Thomas Hardy’s poem of 1920, ‘If you had known’, he refers back to his courtship of his first wife Emma Lavinia Gifford which took place high on the clifftops and deep in the moist green valleys of North Cornwall. This poem was written fifty years after he first met her there as an architect travelling from Dorset to restore the church tower. Hardy returned to the area after her death in what Kenneth Phelps describes as a kind of ‘pilgrimage of penance’ which pained from him some of his most beautiful poetry. He describes in the poem the wet walk back from Beeny Cliff towards the Old Rectory of St Juliot’s in the Valency Valley, ‘by crooked ways and over stiles of stone.’

Returning myself after 32 years, I walked some of the same ways I had done whilst there on a painting holiday (which also turned into walking) at 17. And this time although still spellbound in a romantic homage to Hardy, I was captivated as if for the first time by the wonderful stiles and walls, and naturally, the crooked ways that lead to and away from them.

A gatepost graced a field entrance, crescent-shaped with its straight edge facing inwards, a slim half moon facing away from the gate. I approached it from a roadway wrapped in a tunnel of dark ivy, so that the gateway opened like a window onto light, framing the steep rise of a pale green field.

Such structures sprung up at me all over the fields where I walked. A chink in a high hedge or dry stone wall invites walkers with ingenious system of slate slabs sidelong. There are steep two-sided staircases; a kissing gate squeezed under a holly tree in the nook of a wall; slate cattle grids at a churchyard entrance. And all the slate seems silk-edged and petrol-sheened with long use by hands and feet and weather. All has been built and maintained for human thoroughfare, on foot. And it all seems like art to me.

Across open fields, the paths marked on the map often seeemd invisible. I was guided only by a chink in the hedge opposite, or by the suggestion of a darker green meandering line teased in the grass by repeated footfall, or simply by an instinct as to where the ‘desire line’ lay. This sense of the persistence of walkers, and the marks they make in the land has long fascinated me and I think I may have learnt it from early readings of Hardy’s novels.

A re-reading of The Return of the Native, my A-level text, had me following characters across the huge imperturbable face of Egdon Heath, in daylight and darkness, in confidence and fear. Eustacia Vye, the discontented dark witch-beauty, is practised in her footcraft, finding paths which are, ‘an infinitely small parting in the shaggy locks of the Heath’. Hardy shows us how the regular ‘haunters’ of the Heath feel their way in the dark: ‘The whole secret of following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike-road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night rambling in little-trodden spots. To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.’

For me, this ‘going back’ has been a pilgrimage of happy rediscovery rather than of penance – a rediscovery both of a place where I found new things outside and inside myself and of the literature of Thomas Hardy. It has brought with it a finer appreciation of how walking made him both the man and the writer that he was, and how he influenced my own walking and writing.

St Finnan's Island to the Iron Church across Hills of Lead

I have recently walked a six mile path in the West Highlands that links the village of Polloch to Strontian, rising over the shoulder of Ben Resipol (pictured) at over 1000 feet, and linking fresh water Loch Shiel with salty Loch Sunart. Each loch cuts a dramatic 25 mile gash inland and each has a feature that once drew columns of human traffic to it.


Eilean Fhianain, the island of St Finnan, sits in a twist in such a narrow point of Loch Shiel that you almost feel you can touch the island from its banks. This island was a traditional burial ground and drew coffin paths to it from all over the once heavily populated areas of Sunart, Moidart and Ardnamurchan. The ragged high land must have taxed the coffin-bearers and resting points are still marked with huge cairns.


On an OS map of 1925, on the high pass between Polloch and Strontian, where, a few metres apart, a cairn overlooks each valley, a well is attributed to St Finnan. The well suggests this path must once have been the final journey for the people of Strontian. After the mid 18th century as they dropped steeply towards Loch Shiel, the procession would have passed the Corantee lead mines. The mines are best known for the discovery of the mineral Stronianite in 1791 which was named after the village. The chemists Crawford and Cruickshank concluded that it contained a new “earth”, subsequently Dr Thomas Hope's research set the scene for the discovery of the element strontium by Humphry Davy in 1808. The hillside is still scarred and cleaved there. Building rubble, broken cogs and implements lie on the ground in rusty testimony.

So what about traffic heading the other way? Perhaps its most remarkable use was as a religious pathway at the time of the 'Disruption' of the Scottish Church in the 1840s. At this time, the Church of Scotland was ruled over by Parliament, making the reigning monarch head of the church and the local Laird ‘Patron'. This meant that he would choose his own minister rather then the congregation doing so. In 1843 unrest about this unwelcome link between politics and spirituality came to a head and most ordinary people chose to rebel by joining a break-away movement, the ‘free church’.

Such was the spiritual hunger of the people that accompanied the physical hunger of potato famine in the area, that when the Laird, Sir James Milles Riddell refused to sell them land on which to build their own ‘free’ church, they met in huge open-air services. People would walk anything up to 20 miles to the small bay at Ardnastang just a mile west of Strontian, sometimes barefoot, in order to gather in all weathers and seasons between the low and high tide marks in services that went on for several hours. The 'Corantee' path would have been the most direct route for worshippers from Polloch.

This poverty-stricken community, having recognised that the sea could not be ‘owned’, took it a step further. They resolved their situation by raising an extraordinary amount of money to commission from a shipbuilder on the Clyde an amphibious 'Iron Church' able to accommodate up to 750 people. In July 1846 it was towed by two tugs around the Mull of Kintyre and through the Sound of Mull into Loch Sunart (pictured). People lined the shores to celebrate its arrival and flocked to it by foot and boat from Morven, Ardnamurchan and Moidart. For ten years it remained anchored just off Ardnastang and during this time the popularity of its visiting ministers was gauged from the ‘plimsoll line’ of church attendance - an inch for each hundred congregation.


There are still many parts of the story to assimilate and imagine. This is a place of careering crags, jagged skylines, and tiny communities that teeter on the edge of the Atlantic. We might think of the land as 'wild' and uninhabited. But there is a sense that human footfall, industry and belief has stamped stories on these hills. This path is an important one to keep in use. I loved walking it with this great sense of history, passion, religious observance and human ingenuity beating a rhythm under my feet.

Glen Nevis, glen of stones

Saturday in Fort William may have been one of the wettest and windiest this year, but it didn't deter twelve workshop participants from joining me to respond creatively to the experience of walking beside the swollen river in Glen Nevis. Note-taking as we went, we used observation and imagination to generate words.

We got tuned into the place with senses of touch and sound and smell by denying our sense of sight, working in pairs - one guide, one blindfolded. One person trusted their partner enough to end up lying on the river-bank, head hanging over the racing river; another knee deep in a ditch, plunging his hands underwater to feel the skin-like texture of the bottom.

We created a character to inhabit as we walked - on a journey as film-maker, stalker, cattle drover, munro-bagger. We imagined what they had on their feet and what they carried in their pockets, what filled their heads as they walked and how their state of mind shaped their perception of the landscape. This led to some very interesting pieces including one from the point of view of a dog.

We changed scale - looking closely at a rock, lichen, moss, tree bark – and imagining it is a vast plain or forest or sea. What would it be like to walk through this landscape?
Back at the Ben Nevis Inn, participants wrote up their notes into short pieces. The diversity was astonishing - historical stories; a description of music created by the combined rhythms of river and footfall; the reaction of a rock to the fierce river that is challenging and overwhelming it today, etc. Each piece of writing was unique - the individual's response to the world in that time and place expressed through their own idiosyncratic choice of words.