It’s the Cairngorms Nature at Home Big 10 Days! This WAS going to be the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend and I WAS going to be over with the rangers in The Cabrach in Morayshire leading a family story-making session. Hopefully, all of that can still happen next year, but in the meantime the folks at Cairngorms Nature have organised a fantastic programme of virtual events from 15th to 24th May. That means people all around the world can enjoy this exceptional place while staying safely at home.
To mark the event, I’m sharing a nature poem each day on Instagram and Twitter. The ten together make up a series called The High Tongue, printed below, which were my contribution to our Shared Stories anthology last year. Exploring the names of ten of the Cairngorm mountains, each title begins with the anglicised version, followed by the Gaelic spelling (if different) and then the translation, which is explored in the rest of the poem. They are all Cairngorms Lyrics. This is a new poetic form I invented last year as Writer in Residence for the Park and you can read all about it here. (For pronunciation of the Gaelic names, look out for a recording I’ll post soon of me reading them all.)
Ben MacDuie – Beinn MacDuibh The Mountain of the Son of Duff High King of Thunder Old Grey Man Chief of the Range Head of the Clan Cairn Gorm – An Càrn Gorm The Blue Mountain Rainbow height: blaeberry bog brown red deer snow white blackbird dog violet moss green bright
The view from the top of Cairngorm
Carn Ealer - Carn an Fhidhleir Mountain of the Fiddler She plays the rock with the bow of the wind for the stars to dance Cairn Toul – Càrn an t-Sabhail The Barn Shaped Mountain Storehouse of stone Boulders shouldering like beasts in this dark byre Hail drumming the watershed
Cairn Toul
Ben Vuirich – Beinn a’ Bhùirich Mountain of the Roaring Once the haunt of wolves howling at night now just their ghosts in failing light Coire an t-Sneachda – Coirie an t-Sneachdaidh Corrie of the Snow Bowl of white light black rock wind run ice hold hollow of the mountain’s hand
Coire an t-Sneachda
Beinn a’ Bhuird The Mountain of the Table Giants gather in clouds of black for a bite and a blether, bit of craic. Ben A’an – Beinn Athfhinn Mountain of the River A’an in a cleft of silence hidden loch secret river name breathed out like a sigh
Loch Avon
Braeriach – Am Bràigh Riabhach
The Brindled Upland
freckled speckled wind rippled
shape shifting fallen sky
dark light shadow bright
land up high
Am Monadh Ruadh
The Red Mountains
Range of russet hills
forged in fire at first sunrise
old rust rock
glowing still
Am Monadh Ruadh
It’s the Cairngorms Nature at Home Big 10 Days! This WAS going to be the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend and I WAS going to be over with the rangers in The Cabrach in Morayshire leading a family story-making session. Hopefully, all of that can still happen next year, but in the meantime the folks at Cairngorms Nature have organised a fantastic programme of virtual events from 15th to 24th May. That means people all around the world can enjoy this exceptional place while staying safely at home.
To mark the event, I’m sharing a nature poem each day on Instagram and Twitter. The ten together make up a series called The High Tongue, printed below, which were my contribution to our Shared Stories anthology last year. Exploring the names of ten of the Cairngorm mountains, each title begins with the anglicised version, followed by the Gaelic spelling (if different) and then the translation, which is explored in the rest of the poem. They are all Cairngorms Lyrics. This is a new poetic form I invented last year as Writer in Residence for the Park and you can read all about it here. (For pronunciation of the Gaelic names, look out for a recording I’ll post soon of me reading them all.)
Ben MacDuie – Beinn MacDuibh The Mountain of the Son of Duff High King of Thunder Old Grey Man Chief of the Range Head of the Clan Cairn Gorm – An Càrn Gorm The Blue Mountain Rainbow height: blaeberry bog brown red deer snow white blackbird dog violet moss green bright
The view from the top of Cairngorm
Carn Ealer - Carn an Fhidhleir Mountain of the Fiddler She plays the rock with the bow of the wind for the stars to dance Cairn Toul – Càrn an t-Sabhail The Barn Shaped Mountain Storehouse of stone Boulders shouldering like beasts in this dark byre Hail drumming the watershed
Cairn Toul
Ben Vuirich – Beinn a’ Bhùirich Mountain of the Roaring Once the haunt of wolves howling at night now just their ghosts in failing light Coire an t-Sneachda – Coirie an t-Sneachdaidh Corrie of the Snow Bowl of white light black rock wind run ice hold hollow of the mountain’s hand
Coire an t-Sneachda
Beinn a’ Bhuird The Mountain of the Table Giants gather in clouds of black for a bite and a blether, bit of craic. Ben A’an – Beinn Athfhinn Mountain of the River A’an in a cleft of silence hidden loch secret river name breathed out like a sigh
Loch Avon
Braeriach – Am Bràigh Riabhach
The Brindled Upland
freckled speckled wind rippled
shape shifting fallen sky
dark light shadow bright
land up high
Am Monadh Ruadh
The Red Mountains
Range of russet hills
forged in fire at first sunrise
old rust rock
glowing still
Am Monadh Ruadh
Well that’s a wrap! On the 21st of November we raised our glasses and cheers in a celebration event to mark the end of the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project and to launch the anthology of writing that was gathered across the year. Wonderfully, some people travelled from as far as Falkirk, Perth, Aberdeen and even Ayrshire to swell the 70-strong crowd at The Pagoda in Grantown.
As well as wee speeches from Grant Moir, CEO of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, Anna Fleming, project manager, and myself, we had readings from several contributors. These featured commissioned writer Linda Cracknell, poets Karen Hodgson Pryce and Jane Mackenzie, and local crofter Lynn Cassells, whom some of you will know from the BBC programme This Farming Life. A personal delight was to round off the readings with a line-up of Cairngorms Lyrics that included Neil Reid, editor of Mountaineering Scotland magazine, pupils at Kingussie High School and myself.
To break up all the words, we had a couple of sets by the Suie folk musicians and finished the evening on a high with the Gaelic singing and step dancing of Comhlan Luadh Bhàideanach, the Badenoch Waulking Group. Their songs all come from the tradition of Highland and Island women singing together round a table as they rhythmically pound and work the tweed. Comhlan Luadh Bhàideanachhave been together for nearly 25 years and in October won the Harris Tweed Authority trophy at the Royal National Mod. It was brilliant to bring these groups of musicians back into the Shared Stories project again as they had supported our open mic night in the Badenoch Festival in September.
At the end, everyone milled about over drinks and nibbles, grabbed copies of the book and discovered many connections and crossed paths. Scotland is a small place, and never smaller than when landscape and literature meet. Anna Fleming had led the editing and production of the anthology, sourcing the perfect cover art from Steffan Gwyn and overseeing the design to yield a beautiful, high-quality publication of which we’re all very proud. Copies are available in visitor centres, bookshops and libraries across the Park, by donation to The Cairngorms Trust.
And for those who don’t have a copy yet, here’s my introduction to the anthology, which is also a good way of summing up the work of the year. (Don’t worry – this is not my last post and chorus – that’s next week!)
Introduction
It’s a very powerful thing to fall in love. Lynn Cassells, p 77
This book is a story of the heart. It is a collection of writings from very different people with one thing in common: their interactions with the rocky heart of Scotland, the Cairngorms. As you will see, it is what Nan Shepherd called ‘a traffic of love’.
The anthology arises from the 2019 project Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms. Organised and part-funded by the Cairngorms National Park Authority, with additional funding from The Woodland Trust and Creative Scotland, the project set out to encourage people to write creatively about how we and nature thrive together. As the first Writer in Residence for the Park, my role was to facilitate this work through a varied programme of activities taking me all over the bens and glens of the Cairngorms and into the company of countless folk. There were open workshops in three locations, drop-ins at the Cairngorms Nature Big Weekend and Forest Fest, and workshops with schools, rangers, health walk groups, educators, land-based workers, outdoor instructors and Park volunteers. We invited everyone to the table and welcomed every voice.
Throughout the year, rich conversations emerged about people’s experiences of the natural world of the Cairngorms, whether they were born-and-bred locals, settlers or tourists passing through. Inevitably, there are as many perspectives as there are people. There can be controversy and conflicts of interest across the National Park, but the space for shared creative activity enabled us to exchange views with open-ness and interest, rather than argument.
The groups I attended had some really great insights into the landscape, nature and ways of life that I had not seen before. Blair Atholl participant
Most people claim to value nature, to see it as both beautiful and necessary, but most of us have blind spots about the ways in which we threaten it. A key element of the project, therefore, was to address blind spots. Not by exposing ignorance or harmful lifestyles, but by turning the focus the other way and opening our eyes to nature: encouraging us to peer deeply, to pay attention, to discover the complexity and wonder of the world around. We appealed to the senses, going outside wherever possible to tune into the sights, smells, sounds and feelings of a place. Sometimes I spread forest finds across a table – moss, lichen, leaves, stones and branches – and we focused on one small thing. Much like Linda Cracknell in Weaving High Worlds on page 46, people discovered infinite dimensions.
Attending the Shared Stories workshops changed the way I appreciated the Cairngorms. I saw a richness of colour and depth of texture that had previously passed me by. Ballater participant
But more than just discovery, the project invited people to capture their encounters in words. In trying to find the right words, we are forced to pay even closer attention and move beyond assumptions. What exactly is the colour of that sky – here, now? How surprising that this clump of earthy moss smells like medicine, not dirt. And when we make attention a habit – a way of being in the world – we begin to notice how astonishing, how precious and how vulnerable nature is. Alec Finlay in Conspectus, page 16 talks of ‘the power of looking.’ We become aware of what is here, what is lost and what is on the brink. It becomes a gaze of love. And, I hope, of committed action. We will look after what we love.
Thank you for opening our eyes and ears. Kingussie participant
An important thread through Shared Stories has been the celebration of languages. In the workshops, we explored the Gaelic, Scots and Pictish place names of the Cairngorms, along with the rich lexicon of local words for the outdoors. Amanda Thomson’s A Scots Dictionary of Nature was an inspirational source, as you will see from her sixty two words for rainy weather on page 62.
Early in the year, I invented the poetic form the Cairngorms Lyric which proved a dynamic tool for enabling all kinds of people to capture a Cairngorms moment while also enjoying language diversity. Folks were delighted to discover they could write the entire Lyric in their own language and I was delighted in turn to hear many different languages joining the Shared Stories throng. That is why a Spanish Lyric is included in this collection, along with poems in Gaelic and Doric.
Being able to use my own language makes me feel I belong.Abernethy participant
Finally, a fundamental aspect of the project has been the sharing of the stories. This always happened in the workshops, of course, but also spilled out onto eight banners displayed in Visitor Centres across the Park. We held an open mic night as part of the new Badenoch Festival in September, drawing both workshop participants and others to tell their tales. In addition, we encouraged input from anybody, anywhere, who would like to express their Cairngorms nature encounters, and these pieces – from as far afield as the US and Australia – appear on our project blog: sharedstoriescairngorms.tumblr.com It has been exciting, too, to see Shared Stories activities in other contexts, such as RSPB’s Sarah Walker getting Junior Rangers to write Cairngorms Lyrics at Insh Marshes.
For me, it has been a year of gifts. I have learnt so much from my own traffic with this place and its people and have a head humming with experiences, images and words. Some of these have taken shape in my blog about the project, Writing the Way, and others are emerging as poems, but much of it will continue to find voice in the years to come, I am sure. For this store of treasure, I am deeply grateful.
This anthology, therefore, seeks to capture the range of voices and experiences that have responded to Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms. The work here spans young children to a woman in her 80s; academics to farmers; ‘locals’ to visitors. There are works commissioned from four professional authors and anonymous pieces found amongst papers at the end of drop-in workshops; there are poems and prose pieces; serious reflections and comic encounters; enduring memories and luminous visions.
Throughout, these voices express the shared sense that we, in our humanity, are part of nature and integral to this place. In the earth’s thriving, is our own thriving; in the well-being of the Cairngorms environment, is the well-being of its community. As Samantha Walton says in Embodiment, page 22 ‘How rare to be alive to all this’.
We invite you to celebrate with us this shared life – and this shared love – of the Cairngorms.
Photo by Stewart Grant
Last week I described my first outing with the Health Walk Group in Glen Tanar. As Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many kinds of people of all ages right across this vast and varied landscape. Some of them have eagerly signed up to attend a writing workshop; others, like school classes, are just lumbered with me. (Though with sometimes surprising results.) And then there are the folk like the Glen Tanar ones, who already have a deep and joyous relationship with their natural environment and no need to write about it. They did, however, graciously welcome me to come along.
My walk with them the first week was cloaked in mist and the swirling stories of the Glen’s history – natural and human. We shared delight in the place and one another’s company, both outdoors and in the warmth of the Boat Inn; and though we didn’t write anything down, the conversations were rich. It’s always been an important principle of the project that we encourage responses to the Cairngorms environment in both spoken and written form. As a local friend observed to me, talking rapturously about this landscape in which he grew up, “I don’t write, Merryn, but I can talk for Scotland!”
Talking is definitely welcome. Which is why I was very happy at the end of my first meeting with the Glen Tanar group. Even though they’d been clear they didn’t want to write, they had been generous in sharing their stories of this beautiful place. I was very much looking forward to seeing them the following week.
I’d barely got home, however, when an email dropped into my inbox from one of the group: Anna. Using several Scots nature words, she’d crafted a Cairngorms Lyric!
Glen Tanar walked in muggle
Autumn 🍂 colours, heron.
Injured puddock walked safely to linky edge.
muggle = drizzling rain; puddock = frog; linky = flat & grassy
I was delighted. Then the next day, another email arrived from Margaret:
“Thanks for joining us on the walk yesterday. I really enjoyed the session afterwards at The Boat Inn.
I’ve always loved reading but have never felt the urge to write for pleasure. However, as we were walking round the loch I felt that I should, perhaps, make the effort to come up with something short and simple and produced this.
Yellow, gold, rust and brown
Autumn’s leaves drift down, heralding Winter’s chill.
This morning, I decided to have a go at a Cairngorms Lyric. This is the result.
Like a sentinel, tall and still,
the silent heron waits by the lochan’s glassy waters.
I’ve just looked online and found that an old Scots name for the heron is “Lang Sandy” so another version could be:
Like a sentinel, tall and still,
Lang Sandy waits silently by the lochan’s glassy waters.
I doubt I’ll set the heather on fire with these but I’ve enjoyed doing it. Feel free to discard or share as you see fit.”
Glen Tanar Loch
Let me tell, you, these beautiful offerings definitely set my heather on fire! I couldn’t stop grinning – and definitely couldn’t wait to get back to them all. “What are you like?” I said, as we gathered in the car park the next Friday. “The group that doesn’t want to write sends me wonderful poems straight away!” We all laughed.
Our walk that day, this time with Ranger Eric, was bathed in autumn sun, every leaf and frosted twig shining. As we went, we stopped at different points to focus on one sense at a time, smelling the earthy leaf mould underfoot and listening to the rushing Tanar and the high piping of birds. At an old bridge, we pulled off our gloves to explore the textures around us: rusting metal, granite, tree bark, slick wet ice, moss that is normally spongy but now frozen hard as rock.
At the high point of the trail where the view opens towards Mount Keen, we stood in brilliant light, taking in all we could see. Fragile drifts of mist rose from the dark forests, echoing the strands of cloud in the sky, where the blue shifted from intense on the horizon to pale above.
“Look!” said Donald, pointing with his stick. All around us, the long grasses were rimed with sparkling frost, and on each blade, droplets of melting ice glowed like jewels. “See the colours!” He said. And it was true, the longer we looked, the more we noticed flashes of rainbow hues as tiny beads of water caught the sun. “There’s a red one!” someone cried. “Oh look at the brightness of that green!”
When we stop to pay attention, there is no end to the world’s miracles.
Rowan berries, Glen Tanar gardens
Back at the Boat Inn, Anna and Margaret succumbed to my persuasion and shared their poems, to great appreciation from the group. And then – wonder of wonders! – Aileen pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket and confessed she’d scribbled some Cairngorms Lyrics, too. (And for those who don’t know Doric, the translation is below.)
It’s nae the pine I’ll min’
Bit the flash o’ the dipper in the burn.
(It’s not the pine I’ll remember
But the flash of the dipper in the stream.)
I kent the mannie fa’s grannie
planted the linden tree.
That’s foo aul’ I am.
(I knew the man whose grannie
planted the linden tree.
That’s how old I am.)
Well, as you can imagine, I was thrilled. The non-writers of Glen Tanar had penned some beautiful poems and, I’ll wager, were as surprised and delighted as I was. Long may they wander, wonder and – now and again – even write.
Hooray! It’s National Poetry Day today!
For my five years at Kingussie High School library, this was always one of the highlights of my year, when we had poetry readings at lunchtime with drinks and biscuits. There was always a heart-thrilling mix of poems, including in other languages and, last year, in song.
National Poetry Day is a wonderful, country-wide celebration of poems classic and contemporary; a chance to return to an old favourite and discover new gems; an encouragement to sharpen your pencil and have a go yourself.
If that sounds too difficult and you’re struggling for ideas, why not try a Cairngorms Lyric? They’re only 15 words long and even if you’ve never been to this beautiful part of Scotland, you can still write one. If you do, please share it with the hashtag #CairngormsLyric and let’s see how many we can have ringing round the internet!
Here’s one of mine, the first of a series of ten called Calling the Mountains which I will read at Ness Book Fest tomorrow (Friday 4th October) and will be published in our Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms anthology coming out in November:
Ben MacDuie – Beinn MacDuibh
The Mountain of the Son of Duff
High King of Thunder
Old Grey Man
Chief of the Range
Head of the Clan
Another fun and non-threatening way of coming up with poetry is to do it with others. I don’t believe poems are meant to be solitary pursuits; they grow out of our lives together and are shared back into the world. They can also be created in community.
One of my workshops for the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project was with the tremendous folks who volunteer across the Park as Health Walk leaders. In the morning we followed HighLife Highland ranger, Saranne Bish, around Anagach woods, where she told us so many fascinating things about the forest and sent us seeking out all its colours. Here’s a wee video of it made by Sian Jamieson from the Park team: Anagach Walk
In the afternoon, I led a workshop on how Health Walk groups might explore different creative responses through words, whether investigating place names, using Talk Cards or writing. One activity was to get everyone to complete the sentence ‘On today’s walk…’ on a post-it note. I gathered these in, arranged them in an appealing order and – voila – a Group Poem was born! Reading it out to everyone at the end of the workshop brought surprise and delight at how easy it was to create and how rewarding to hear.
On Today’s Walk
Group Poem created at Cairngorms National Park Health Walk Leaders’ Training Day
11th September 2019
On today’s walk
we met, we talked, we stopped, we observed
life on a dead tree
On today’s walk
we chatted with new people
we stopped a few times to look around
the sun shone
and the wind blew the cobwebs away!
On today’s walk
we looked at the spectrum of colours
the chatter flowed
the senses were stirred
On today’s walk
we collected a range of scraps
of colour in nature,
looked at lichen
through a magnifier
we sensed the soft decay of autumn
we found the mushrooms for tea
On today’s walk
there was no rain
the invisible snail left a clue
a visible, silvery trail
On today’s walk
we did talk, talk, talk
Why not try it with your own group, whether on a family holiday, with work colleagues (see here for how CEO Grant Moir did something very creative for the Park staff away-day) or in a club or hobby group? Whatever you do, please take a moment on National Poetry Day to stop for a moment and savour a poem – reading or writing. Use the comments below to tell me your all-time favourites!
I’d heard about this wonderful wee festival that happens at the Highland Folk Museum every August – all about wood – but never made it along before (usually because it’s Edinburgh Festival season). But this year, I was lucky enough to have Forest Fest in my programme of activities for the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project, so I was definitely going.
The Highland Folk Museum is a living history museum in the town of Newtonmore that demonstrates Highland life from the 1700s on. Established by the noted folklorist Dr Isabel Grant in 1935 it is now an award-winning free and open museum, drawing thousands of visitors ever year.
Forest Fest, supported by The Woodland Trust and Scottish Forestry, has been one of its special event days for several years now and is growing in popularity, with some people planning their holidays around it. It’s easy to see why. Alongside all the usual exhibits spread across the 80 acre site, the Fest brings together a colourful cohort of folk all demonstrating skills and passions centred around wood.
The main attraction is always Tarzan the horse, who helps his man Simon haul logs in the traditional way. Then there are the Sawdust Fusiliers Living History Group recreating the Canadian Forestry Corps who were based here during WWII; the sawmill; the small wooden boats called coracles paddling across the mill pond; opportunities to make traditional tinders and wooden crafts; guided woodland walks; bird-spotting and mini-beast hunting; and tree-themed storytelling.
And then there was me. In a damp barn in the corner with paper and pens. Well, it was easy to feel upstaged and drab next to all the woodland wonders happening beyond, and my cheerful signs about ‘creative writing for all ages’ seemed an effective repellent to most visitors. I know, I know. It all looks too much like school.
I was there, of course, with my Writer in Residence hat on trying to woo people into the woodland groove with a word or two. I had activity sheets galore and cunning plans to sweep folks off into the trees for sensory walks that segued seamlessly into poetry, snatches of travelogue and profound personal memoir. All right, all right, I’d be happy with just a few scratches in the dirt if only somebody would give it a try.
But gradually, they came. Especially when the rain bucketed down and my dark barn suddenly turned into an inviting haven. One wee boy threw himself at the colouring pens with gusto. No wafty tree pictures for him, this was Pacman! When I crowed with delight over another boy’s yellow rabbit, he told me scornfully it was Pikachu (another video game character, for those who have led a sheltered life.) But how could I despair when his little sister drew hearts and gave them to me with huge, melting eyes?
And then, slowly but surely, the writing stuff started to happen. A woman and teenaged daughter wrote a Cairngorms Lyric in Dutch and English. A wee fellow raced outside with his senses activity sheet and got Mum to fill in all the boxes; a beautiful little girl from Dubai took me with her to do the same. More kids took sheets, a few more adults had a go at nature poems.
The next day an outdoor shelter was free and I decamped there, maximising on the passing trade between the fabby Roots & Shoots women making wooden necklaces and the ice cream van. More folk came. Actually, most of them came when Liz English took over for half an hour. One of the museum curators, she kindly gave me a break to go on a tree discovery walk with Alan Crawford of the Woodland Trust. (Brilliant, by the way.) I returned to discover a veritable publishing house. The tables were awash with fully illustrated activity sheets and reams of rhyming verse. Always good to know how dispensable one is.
But it didn’t stop there. A French family came by to add their Cairngorms Lyric and two girls from Glasgow spent ages filling out their sensory sheets and writing poems from them. One attends a Gaelic-medium school and finished hers with a few lines of Gaelic.
The other took advice and inspiration from the young Edinburgh history graduate and emerging writer, Hazel Atkinson, who was a volunteer at the Fest helping with the storytelling. And that was the final gift of the day. Packing up, I found her poems lying quietly amongst the Pacmans and Pikachus. Two of the cleverest acrostics I’ve seen in a long time, they confirm that not only is she a writer to watch, but also – though it may not compete with Tarzan the Wonder Horse – ‘creative writing for all ages’ can make magic.
As loyal readers of Writing the Way, I thought you might enjoy this recent article by Roger Cox, Arts & Books Editor of the Scotsman Newspaper. It is copyright of The Scotsman Publications and is being used with their kind permission. All images, unless otherwise stated, are my own.
Forget haiku – Cairngorm Mountains inspire new type of poem
Merryn Glover, author, poet and educator, is sitting in a cafe in Edinburgh’s New Town, telling me about “The Cairngorms Lyric”– a new poetic form she’s devised in her role as writer in residence for the Cairngorms National Park. “Initially it came from the idea of a haiku,” she says, “and what Allen Ginsberg did with that, the American Sentence, which he thought was more fitting for American culture. [The American Sentence was a single sentence of 17 syllables.] “I thought, ‘Why can’t we come up with a poetic form that’s unique to the Cairngorms?’ So the idea of the Cairngorms Lyric emerged.”
The rules, she explains, are deliberately simple and the idea is that “everybody and anybody” can have a go at writing one. Rule One: a Cairngorms Lyric must have 15 words – not syllables, as it’s easier for kids to count words. Why 15? “The 15 comes from when the park was established in 2003. There are five local authorities, five of Scotland’s ten highest mountains, and five of Scotland’s most iconic rivers flow out of it – so three times five is 15.”
“The second rule is that it has to include an element of nature in the park,” she continues, “and the third is that it needs to include one word of non-English origin, so Gaelic, Scots, Pictish… those languages are all there in the local place names and even if you use the word “loch” you have one. But the one word can be in any language, and we’re encouraging people to write the whole poem in their own language if they want to, partly just to push back against the dominance of English and partly to celebrate the linguistic heritage of the area and also the contemporary linguistic diversity.”
Glover, who lives in Kincraig, took up her writer in residence post at the start of the year, and in the last few months she has held writing workshops for adults and schoolchildren all over the Cairngorms National Park, from Aviemore to Tomintoul, under the banner Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms. Her residency is co-funded by the Woodland Trust, the Cairngorms National Park Authority and Creative Scotland, and it allows her to spend 70 days doing education and outreach work and a further 30 days working on her own writing. One of the Park’s priorities, she says, is strengthening people’s relationship with the natural environment, so, wherever possible, she’s been holding workshops in the open air, in Abernethy Forest, for example, or on the banks of the River Spey.
Of course, trying to quantify the outcomes of projects like this is a more-or-less impossible task: “After attending this workshop, would you say you felt your relationship with the natural environment is a) stronger, b) weaker or c) about the same?” However, anecdotally at least, the workshops certainly seem to be popular, with some people even travelling from outside the park in order to attend.
My favourite story, however – and a great advertisement for the power of the Cairngorms Lyric as a literary leveller – involves a workshop Glover ran in a primary school.
“In one of the workshops I do in schools I start with this activity of getting the kids to put themselves on the spectrum in terms of how much they like being outside and how they feel about writing,” she says. “I tell them, ‘if you love writing go to that end of the room, if you hate writing go down that end.’
“So at one school there was one wee boy who was all the way down the far end for loving being outside, but then for writing he went all the way to the other end, shot out the door, went all the way down the corridor and he would’ve been down the fire escape if it hadn’t been for his teacher running after him and getting him back in. But he ended up just churning out Cairngorms Lyrics at the workshop and really having a fun time. He just couldn’t contain himself by the end, writing all these lyrics and desperately wanting to read them all out.”
At the end of her residency, Glover is hoping to publish a book of writing by the people who have attended her workshops, both poetry and prose, and she is planning to use her 30 days of dedicated writing time to work on her own poetry. In terms of a lasting legacy, though, look no further than the Cairngorms Lyric, which, you can’t help feeling, could be around for some time to come.
Namaste!
Most of you probably recognise the word, some of you use it in yoga classes and some may even know what it means. Pronounced num–ah-steh it is the commonest greeting across the Hindu world, usually with palms pressed together, and serves as both hello and goodbye. It’s been part of my vocabulary from childhood as I was born in Kathmandu and grew up in South Asia, so I love hearing it whenever I go back to my beloved Himalayan countries, and I use it as the sign-off for my newsletters. I was amused, therefore, to discover it recently in this Cairngorms Lyric from a workshop participant:
The wind blows, the trees move,
A bird swoops upwards gracefully,
SPLAT! Wind turbine.
Namaste!
One of the three rules of this new poetic form, arising from the Shared Stories project, is that at least one word must be of non-English origin. A very intelligent teenager in a workshop I was leading for Moniack Mhor Young Writers, rightly pointed out that most of the English language has developed from other sources. So it has, and remains all-embracing in continuing to absorb words from everywhere including street slang, tech and the constantly evolving vocabularies of popular use. And that’s the point. If people use them, words inevitably become part of the language.
Despite what English teachers, Scrabble players and other pedants (I’m all three) might insist about what is or isn’t a ‘real word’ or ‘proper English’, there is no legal boundary. Even the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t own the language; it merely seeks to record it. We do have a thing called ‘Standard English’ and it’s useful for people to learn, as it’s the medium of much information and power, but all the other forms of this vast, sprawling, boundless tongue are not incorrect or inferior, just variations on a constantly changing theme.
But that vastness is part of the problem. English is a great river into which all the words of the world can run, but it also threatens to flood them, to dilute the richness of other languages and to drown them out altogether. Language loss is happening at an alarming rate across the globe. I say alarming because language is a profoundly important expression of culture, and to erase language is to erase a people’s distinct voice and with it, much of their history, literature, song, beliefs and practices. Increasingly, diverse ethnic groups are being absorbed into ever-dominant and homogenised cultural monoliths, and quite often, language is the driver.
Sometimes, this is because ethnic groups rightly recognise their need of the national and/or English language in order to access education, work and influence, and without it they are disadvantaged. At other times, national policies have enforced use of the state language and punished use of indigenous languages and dialects, as happened with Gaelic in Scotland. For both these reasons and more, English is increasingly dominant world-wide, and though I support everyone’s right to learn it to meet their needs, I am also passionate about reinforcing linguistic diversity.
That is the reason I was very keen from the outset of the Shared Stories project that we encourage the use of other languages. This includes the heritage languages of Scotland – Gaelic and Scots – but also all the others spoken by residents and visitors in the Cairngorms National Park. One of the activities I run in schools involves looking at Gaelic, Scots and even Pictish words for landscape and nature, as explored in the Place Names of the National Park leaflet and map, and several books including Amanda Thomson’s wonderful compilation A Scot’s Dictionary of Nature.
And that is why the Cairngorms Lyric must have at least one non-English word. That’s not difficult. Just mentioning a loch or Ben Macdui or a ‘wee’ bird will do it. But many people have enjoyed digging deeper and drawing from the rich meanings of the place names and old words. Loch Mallachie means The Loch of the Curse; Càrn an Tuirc is the Mountain of the Wild Boar. Other people, wonderfully, have included words from other mother-tongues or languages they know. Sometimes, as in the namaste above, they are just a single word. A Welsh boy delighted in having his own country’s greeting in the middle of his lyric:
My feet squelched through wet mud
“Bore da!”
I cried to the squirrels and birds.
- Eoin Jones
But the rules of the Cairngorms Lyric mean the entire thing can be written in another language. When I said this at the workshops I led for school groups at the Rural Skills Day on Monday, faces lit up. Two Polish teens wrote poems that were a mystery to me but had them rolling with laughter; another teen wrote in her native Spanish, which impressed her pals no end; another teamed with a friend to work on the English version together and then she wrote the Polish, which her friend copied down. I loved the way these responses not only reinforced the young person’s use of their language but brought celebration and respect from their peers.
Then in the beautiful Abernethy woods on Wednesday night I led a workshop with teachers and other practitioners for the wonderfully named OWLS: Outdoor and Woodland Learning Scotland. One participant spoke of how Gaelic words for colours were so much more expressive to her. Another read her Lyric in French, filling our forest glade with sounds that, even if we didn’t understand them, were beautiful. “We don’t understand what the birdsong means,” I commented, “but we still enjoy it.” A Danish participant spoke of how glad she was the project embraced other languages and it led to a discussion of the rich potential of drawing from all the languages in the classroom and the many extensions activities such as audio recordings and learning about translation.
And so I invite, I encourage, I urge YOU to join in the project, in your own tongue, and to share the richness of your language and voice with all of us. Come along to a workshop or send us your writing about the nature of the Cairngorms to share on our website and our end-of-year anthology. We want to hear you!
Namaste!
Staff away days can be notorious for press-ganging resistant folk through ‘team-building’ exercises like tying Betty from accounts to intern Joey’s back and asking them to leap-frog across the Director in a muddy ditch. Or, just when they’re all filthy and furious, getting them to role-play conflict resolution while onlookers keep score. You might have endured one yourself. Or even organised it. But have you ever been at one that involved writing poetry? The thought may be more excruciating for you than any number of Tough Mudders or office pantos, but hats off to Grant Moir, CEO of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, for giving it a go:
“After reading Merryn’s blog and trying my hand at a Cairngorms Lyric via twitter I thought it would be great to get all the staff at the CNPA to do one. We met for an all staff away day at Glenmore Lodge on the 3rd April which was practically the only snowy day of the year. As an icebreaker (quite literally) I asked all the staff to write in 10mins a Cairngorms Lyric. The rules were explained and everyone really got into it. The results really show the absolute love that folk have for the cairngorms, the nature, wildlife and culture. It was great to do something a bit different.”
Grant then dropped me a note: “Merryn, I have 58 Cairngorms Lyrics from staff! If you could judge the best one that would be great. I am donating a bottle of whisky or gin to the winner.” To be fair, he had asked me first and I was delighted to agree and even more so when I read through the poems. What an astonishing collection of images, emotions and personalities shone through those short pieces, and what a magical way to get a feel for the big and varied team that make up the Park staff.
The genesis and rules of The Cairngorms Lyric are explained here, but in essence, it is a new poetic form invented for the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project and is made up of:
– 15 words
– an element of nature
– at least one non-English word
Reading all 58 poems was a dream, but trying to judge a winner was a nightmare! I spread them out on my living room floor, re-read and re-arranged them several times, left them there for several days and dragooned my husband into reading the short-list (a marital team-building exercise). I was struck by several things. One was how powerfully many of the Lyrics expressed the sense of the Cairngorms as home, as in Charlotte Milburn’s above and the one below.
Hame
Crawling up the A9
Brown turns to hazy hues of purple
Cairngorms…
I am hame!
Kate Christie
Several participants took the opportunity to express more political views about the environment, but the issues are sensitive, so I can’t print them here. There were several that enjoyed the opportunity for humour, and some couldn’t resist a little dig at the process:
Snow is falling on Glenmore Lodge.
It’s cold and wet.
Is that it yet?
*Slange.
*Slange or sláinte is Gaelic for ‘health’ or ‘cheers’. Perhaps that writer would have preferred leapfrog. Or something else entirely:
Snow is blanc, squirrels are red.
How I wish I was
at home in bed.
I loved the number of pieces that captured a strong, fresh sense of the natural world:
The osprey in a stramash of water and feathers as it landed the fresh salmon.
Donald Ross
Battle scarred, bleak hills
slowly greening, growing, gathering
a cloak of wild on the woods – healing.
Emma Rawling
If I’m not careful I could end up typing out all 58 of the CNPA Cairngorms Lyrics, because I enjoyed them all so much, but I will settle now for sharing my favourites. This one perfectly captured a Scottish mountain-top experience familiar to so many of us.
Coorying behind a cairn
Cold wind hurtling
Eyes squinting
Lashes filtering snow
Grimace, Brace, Go…
Nancy Chambers
I loved the riddle in the following Lyric and the memory of happy summers with my own kids. Can you guess what it’s about?
Hunters
Guddling about, searching, hunting.
Concentration, competition, down on hunkers.
Satisfaction, blue tongues and lips.
Harvest.
Emma Stewart
Finally, the winning poem stood out for me right from the beginning and stayed at the top of my carpet line-up for the three days. It is reminiscent of haiku in the vivid image of the opening line and the ‘cut’ in the middle that suddenly broadens the perspective: a fleeting moment of bright birds in their antics is set against the ancient time of the wood. Wow. A breath-taking Cairngorms Lyric.
Redpolls and siskins upside down in the birkin branches;
In the forest many lifetimes deep.
Carolyn Robertson
Why not have a go at writing a Cairngorms Lyric yourself? If you do, send it in to us for possible publication on the CNPA website or our end-of-year anthology. Click here for how to do that.