Well-smoked and slightly confused

Well-smoked and slightly confused

at the Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie

last thoughts of a blackhouse on N Uist

I don’t know why these places feel so familiar, and so comfortable. I didn’t grow up in a blackhouse or spend my summers in one of those quaint 2-room tin-shack summer houses by a windswept western beach, but they feel so instantly familiar that I am left confused.

N Uist, looking out

 In the peat-smoked interior of the long, dark, heather-roofed house, the box-bed, the worn dresser, the enamel pans on their nails, I know them all. My grandparents lived in a tenement in  Campbeltown at the tail end of the Mull of Kintyre - the dead-end, they call it now although when we visited there, there was still an RAF base at Macrihanish and a ferry over from Glasgow. That row of tall houses, with their stairs worn into alarming ripples by years of shuffling feet and the outside loo where giant sea-slaters lurked in wait, is long gone. My memories are of darkness and dark uncomfortable furniture and a coal fire range and a tin bath and the cheerfulness of family and the stern-ness of grandparents who were yet indulgent. And the walk in the morning with a jug to the dairy down the road…
and i wonder if the furniture in that upstairs apartment was essentially that of any highland home or any highland couple of a certain vintage, a sort of standard set that might have been found in blackhouse, or croft or tenement apartment in Campbeltown

And that doll’s house of a seasonal home, corrugated iron and sleepers shaping two rooms and looking like the refuge of a maiden aunt. Perhaps that what it is: those clothes hanging behind the door could be her clothes, that coat her coat, the smell of soap, the pin-point neatness, the small ornaments, the understated evidence of a quiet life lived by being and not by owning, all this could be hers.

But I am still standing here in the Highland Folk Museum, blinking in the sunlight and heading for a bit of singing stillness in Leanach Church

N Uist, looking in

Summer stories: workshops for schools and public events 2016

Summer stories

Stories in school

and other excitements

with Creeping Toad,

Summer 2016

celebrating the richness of the season, here are stories, 

sculptures, flags, books and  boggarts

With stories spinning from the first signs of spring right through to earth giants, summer flowers and thunder-tigers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.

a small story-house

Drawing on 30 years of professional experience, my work blends environmental experience with creativity. “Much of my work uses storytelling and story making but I also make small masks, giant masks, flags, lanterns, pop-up landscapes and create wild and wonderful occasions”

Scottish Tour dates: 

April 25th - May 6th

September 5th - 16th

Dates for England & Wales:  

just about any other time - I tend to plan trips as bookings come in

These notes are written for schools. if you have a community grouup or fancy a public event these might give you a guide to what wee might do but talk to me about your specific situation...

a group telling their own stories,  Woodland Trust 2015

In school

A day’s visit to your school might include:

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time 

stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before

(allow 60 minutes for a class session)

New workshop!

headfulls and handfuls of river animals

puppets and headfulls of animals: like the illustration, we can make quick finger puppet animals or magnificent animal crowns. Allow an hour and a half for a class

New workshop!

Heroes for stories: building characters - as quick puppets and as written pieces: capturing the qualities of our characters for stories: their ambitions, triumphs, disasters and secrets - skills for a richer tale

make your own book

story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a library no-one has ever visited before!

pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering ideas, images and words we’ll make quick 3-d landscapes holding the essence of a story in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running

tales of old Scotland: a collection of stories of Highland folklore and Scottish histories, of heroes and sorrows, bravery and the magics of sea, mountain and moor

Ancient Lives:  a wider historical perspective could be involved, by adding a voice from the distant past to your history topics with stories that our Stone, Bronze or Iron Age ancestors might have listened to. Stories, models, artefacts and drawings can feed into art inspired by cave paintings, carvings and jewellery

your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? In recent projects we have also made talking stone puppets, a giant eagle to hang from a classroom ceiling, prehistoric rockpools, a swarm of shadow dragons, pop-up castles

an African selection

Charges: £250 a day: includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you. Activities can be adapted to suit groups from P1 through to Secondary

For further information and to book    

contact Gordon directly at

         creepingtoad@btinternet.com

or by telephone:

landline: 01298 77964

mobile: 07791 096857

release the storytelling pirates!

 

Hugh Miller, stonemason, geologist, writer

Book of the moment

Hugh Miller, stonemason, geologist, writer 

by Michael A Taylor, 

National Museums of Scotland, 2007 ISBN 1 905267 05 3

"the quiet enthusiasm of the true fossil hunter"

Hugh Miller would seem to have been one of those careful Victorian gentlemen* who peered and probed and revealed county flora and folklore, geology and palaeontology and who mixed science with culture and religion in an intriguing, if sometimes patronising, whole.

He was much more than this: a complex mix of pride and humility with a strong sense of his working-class Presbyterian roots and values that guided his out look and informed his attitudes through his sadly shortened life

Pterichthyodes milleri

From the environmental side of things, Miller's collections of fossils from the early 1800s are invaluable as he found, named and laid bare to our fascinated eyes the fish of the Old Red Sandstone of northern Scotland. (They are still fascinating now)

P milleri, revived 

This books weaves it way through this intriguing life and the connections and companions that inspired, helped and frustrated him. While  "quiet enthusiasm" seems right, he was also clearly ready to wade into issues and, as the editor of The Witness , Edinburgh's second-best-selling newspaper of his time, his words on suffrage, land-owneship, the Clearances and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland carried influence. 

A good read!

(* for adventurous Victorian ladies, I would recommend the outspoken and sometimes appallingly judgemental Isabella Bird - Adventures in the Rocky Mountains; and the much more sympathetic Mary Kingsley's The Congo and the Cameroons - both available in Penguin Classics edited versions)

Mountains, sunsets and stories

 A week of telling stories, hearing stories and discovering that there are monsters under the floorboards of one classroom while another class went on a school trip and didn't bother to come home again (they sent postcards), and that the long tussocks of grass are really the hair of the grumpy Grass Goblins with noses like lumps of mud, eyes like pebbles and ears like curved bits of stone

shaping stories

Day upon day, I am caught
By the sudden beauty of of sunsets
That glow across the clouds and throw

 The mountain horizons into glory

no sunset photos but Elgin Cathedral is magnificent!

Walking among old stones, feeling the skeletons of buildings, the skeletons of people, the bare bones of words whispered down through a thousand years...

gates, doors, openings....

and on the beach at Nairn, we sailed
driftwood boats in a sand-eel lagoon