The Sutherland Trail
We are now taking orders for our new book, The Sutherland Trail - a journey through north-west Scotland. I’m particularly excited about this book, a high quality hardback with some superb photography by my compatriot Richard Else. We’ve tried very hard to give a good flavour of Sutherland, its landscapes, its people, folklore, history and the various outdoor activities that people enjoy there, as well as giving a step by step account of the route itself, which I really hope will become a popular walking route.
Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountain of the Mind, and The Wild Places, very kindly read the book and wrote a fine introduction to the book. Let me quote some of it:
“You will probably have heard of the Aboriginal Australian vision of the ‘Songlines’. According to this vision – a theology of a sort – the landscape of Australia is criss-crossed by a network of tracks and paths, which were laid down during the creation of the world. Each of these paths has a corresponding song, whose every note corresponds to a significant feature of the path – a rock outcrop, creek, or eucalypt that it passes, say, or a corner that it turns. To sing, according to this vision, is therefore to find one’s way. Storytelling is indivisible from wayfaring, and the whole landscape is thick with plots and narrative. You just need to know how to sing them up.
“The vision of the Songlines is often contrasted with white settler accounts of Australia’s interior from the mid-nineteenth-century, which saw the desert as a terra nullius, an empty land, ‘a Climax of Desolation’, as the explorer Daniel Brock put it in 1845. Where the white settlers saw an absence of meaning in the landscape, the Aboriginals saw meaning’s abundance. Where the white settlers perceived the desert only laterally, the Aboriginals perceived it deeply.
“Many other indigenous cultures practise a version of the Songlines. The nomadic Chemehuevi of the Mojave Desert, for instance, navigated the wide expanses of arid rock and sand using songs. The songs gave the names of places in geographical order, and the place names were descriptive or evocative, such that a person who’d never been to a place might recognize it from the song. ‘How does that song go?’, in Chemehuevi, means ‘What is the route it travels?’ Similarly, in Navajo culture of the American south-west, place-names that index specific landmarks are told in sequence to form stories or ‘verbal maps’ describing routes of travel for people to follow. Guidelines in the non-bureaucratic sense.
“It seems to me that Cameron McNeish and Richard Else have begun, with their television programme Sutherland – The Empty Lands? and this book, to create a songline for Sutherland. They have summoned, in order to banish, the old heresy of Sutherland as a terra nullius. Instead, they have found and proved it to be a landscape that is superbly rich in history, teeming with life – human and natural – and wealthy with stories, from the Archaean era through to the contemporary. I hope that Cameron’s trail becomes, over the years, a well-trodden path, and that thousands of subsequent pedestrians stride out along it, walking up – waking up – Sutherland’s songs.”
The book is available from Amazon etc and is also available from this website and that of the publisher, www.mountain-media.co.uk