West Highland
If I were to lie back, this is the landscape I’d become –
blanched tussocks, copses of pine,
shining lochs, station platform signs translated
to a language I can’t pronounce;
lazy fences, serious houses, two shaggy rams
by a pleated auburn stream,
alder, beech and dithery aspen,
Munros shouldering the lost weight of snow;
a blaze of gorse along the verge, pylons marching
over bog and moor, the ninety-six miles we walked last year
with backache, slippery from sweat and midge spray,
the craic of good friends keeping us upright
as we lost and found the Way.
From The Last Woman Born on the Island, Vagabond Voices, 2022
*
Where does our love of a place come from? As a child, we sometimes headed north for holidays. I have memories of Hogmanays at Loch Rannoch and the Sands of Morar. Aged twenty-two and suffering from anxious depression, I took a road trip with my sister, visiting places within easy reach that still felt like an adventure: Glen Coe, Ben Nevis, Skye. Of course we climbed to the Old Man of Storr, and it was there, looking out over glittering blue to the islands of Raasay, Rona and Scalpay, that a sense of utter peace came over me and I realised, I mean really knew, that this was as much beauty and joy as it was possible to experience in a human lifetime. I know, it sounds naïve, even arrogant, but it felt utterly true then, and still does today.
Whenever I was away from home, I would walk. Along B roads in France between lifts on hitch-hiking trips, out of town, into vineyards, into the hills, always the hills. In Spain, on my days off from a summer au pair job, I hiked in the Sierra Blanca mountain range and gorged on wild figs, oranges and pomegranates picked from the trees. In the Atlas foothills in Morocco, I hiked to the snowy peaks with my belongings on a donkey. Walking has always been a way of calming my mind and connecting with my body, falling in step with the simple rhythm of the breath, the stride, the heartbeat, the endlessly dependable back-and-forth of the natural world. Getting out among the scrub and the trees, which never try to be anything more but themselves. All walks bring us back to ourselves.
In my mid-twenties, I spent some time in the Highlands with friends. We hiked and got drenched and stuck in marshland. At the point of exhaustion, when we felt like crying and giving up, we somehow, in our camaraderie and also our individual solitudes, found a way to go on. One step and then the next. It’s that simple. Then I met my future husband, who proposed to me on the Ardnamurchan peninsula on Christmas Eve. We had our first daughter, named her Skye, and when she was still a baby, we moved to France for adventure and to run a yoga retreat.
We ended up, as all true adventures do, in the mountains. The French equivalent of the Scottish Highlands, the Cévennes are part of the Massif Central. Deep in the Lozère, the most sparsely populated département of France, is a tiny hilltop village, and as soon as I entered the green valleys below their unforgiving schist ridges, I fell in love with the area. It reminded me of the Scottish Highlands, in particular the west coast inland landscapes with their swathes of purple heather, and the craggy unkempt outcrops of the Cairngorms. Here, I thought, here is where I belong. This is a place I can love. I now live in a remote valley in the adjoining Gard département, part of the same Cévenol massif. There’s a ruggedness, a recalcitrance to the people who live there, that I feel comfortable with.
But I have a need, an almost animal yearning, to return to my Scottish roots. Not that my roots are embedded in Highland soil – they’re not. But the roots that connect me to myself – call it my spiritual roots – most definitely are. And so each year I make a pilgrimage. Recently, I have followed my feet along the West Highland Way, past the sweet yeasty breweries of the Speyside Way, through the Ardnamurchan peninsula, across west coast islands, lochs, the isles. I’m not a Serious Hillwalker: I don’t tick off Munros or walk hundreds of kilometres in a week without pause. But I walk, because I have to.
I need to write like I need to walk. To release a valve, to let something of myself out into the world and make a shape from it – footsteps for a raggedy line through hills, words for a raggedy block on a page.
Where does our love of a place come from? I’d say it rises up much like a plant does from the mysterious dark, as does so much in life, a subject I explore in my new collection Things That Fruit in Darkness (Vagabond Voices, 2026). My left foot is in Scotland, my right is here in France. Sometimes I feel split; I don’t know where I belong. Other times, I juggle my passports and relish my double life, taking refuge in the only place I do feel entirely comfortable – people I love, and words. And still the need to walk, still the need to call some place my home.
*
Pilgrimage
My journey is with the names of things;
words on a page.
Each one an island – an archipelago
of letters bound by sandbars
– anchored in a milk-white sea.
I climb them one by one to understand
their hearts. To know bedrock.
From To Know Bedrock, Pindrop Press, 2011