Gunn's modern pilgrimage

On Wednesday 11 March, during my Following the River mini-residency with Dunbeath Heritage Centre, I’ll be joining the Helmsdale-based arts organisation Timespan on a walk to the monastic site at Ballachly just west of Dunbeath. For Timespan this walk is part of their project 58° North -A Modern Pilgrimage Around the Globe, a journey to discover the creative communities which share with Helmsdale their latitude, coastal setting and population size. For me, this collaboration is an opportunity to explore the ideas in Neil Gunn’s Highland River from a slightly different angle.

Though few people use the term pilgrimage, a lot of Gunn’s critics allude to this idea when they discuss his novel Highland River. In my view, the journey of the adult Kenn is a pilgrimage as the main character senses an immense urge to find the source of the river - ‘the source of being, of all being’ as Dairmid Gunn writes in the introduction to the novel - and this journey is - what this author calls - positive and life-enhancing.

More then ten years ago, when I still lived in The Netherlands, I walked parts of the Way of St. James to Santiago de Compestela in the northeast of Spain. I carefully mapped my route from my hometown to the Spanish city, read many accounts of people who had done so before me and learned about the key cathedral towns en route. On my way, I delighted in visiting churches and monasteries, and encountering signs of the scallop shell that affirmed I was on the right way. And I was in good company. Above all, my memories of the pilgrimage are infused with the kindness of people who recognised me as a pilgrim and with the conversations with fellow pilgrims who shared my path for a few minutes, hours, sometimes even several days.

A few weeks ago I read an account by Celeste Ray about pilgrimages to Ireland’s holy wells in Landscapes Beyond Land, a book edited by the anthropologist Arnar Arnason and colleagues. She describes how Irish communities visit holy wells to venerate the saints associated with them. On the way to the wells these pilgrims visit stations to pray. At the actual well, pilgrims leave votives such as strips of cloth tied to nearby trees and bushes  as a plea to the saint for health and wellbeing for themselves or those close to them. Similar to pilgrims on the Way of St. James, pilgrims to these holy wells follow an established route along which they carry out specific  religious practices as have many people done before them.

It is not hard to see that Kenn’s journey to the source of the river is different from the above religious pilgrimages. I choose, however, to call Kenn’s walk a pilgrimage too. That said, for Kenn the pilgrimage is a personal and his destination is one of personal choice rather than one carrying religious significance. Whereas religious pilgrimage is undertaken for the fulfilment of some prayer, Kenn’s - and my own walk to the source of Gormack Burn - is a journey of discovery and reflection. I would even argue that the path of personal growth involved has become more important than actually reaching the destination. What’s more, the pilgrimage started long before Kenn embarked on the actual walk as it was the strength he derived from his childhood memories of the Highland river when he was in the trenches during the World War I, that ultimately urged him to embark on his walk to the source of the river. From my own pilgrimage along the Way of St. James I’ve learned that the discovery and reflection related to pilgrimage not only precedes and coincides with the physical journey, but also extends well beyond the arrival at one’s physical destination.   

I’m interested in learning more about Timespan’s understanding of pilgrimage in the context of their 58° North project. If you want to join us in our conversation on Wednesday 11 March, please email Jacquie Aitken at enquiries@timespan.org.uk.

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Poem as document

The burn

with the trunk’s gurgling reflection

in the shallow water and the shadow play

of trees on the opposite bank –

a place perfect

for salmon to spawn

After weeks of ice and snow I finally managed to do my second and third walk along Gormack Burn earlier this week. North of Drum Estate the valley has opened up and given me a clear view of the foothills of Hill of Fare where the burn well up. Miles pass, and the view of the hill sharpens up. As I’m approaching the source, the burn has become shallower with the shadows of trees spanning its entire width. The stony riverbed is clear now. 

Documenting the walk through poetry has proven to lift out and intensify my experiences. After capturing initial impressions, I choose a prompt - drawn from my background study of, and my own reflections on Neil Gunn’s novel Highland River - randomly to focus my observations, direct me into the direction of new interpretations and deepen my thoughts. Sometimes ideas for lines or a particular voice or form emerge naturally, sometimes I have to wait until I’m behind my desk before I’m able to create a poem.

Linger, like a magpie in flight –

do not think you know its slight already

The walk influences the poems and the poems influence the walk. What I see, hear and smell serves as a background, metaphor or other vehicle of experiences and thoughts expressed in the poems. Vice versa, my intention to write poems, and the time spent to take notes and develop these into poems, intensifies these observations, experiences and related thoughts and the poems serve as a vehicle to remember these.

I see the poems resulting from my walk along Gormack Burn as working documents rather than finished products. Inherently, they are vehicles for capturing, intensifying and remembering observations, experiences, thoughts. For The Light of the North Festival in Dunbeath in November 2015 I’m creating a longer work of poetry and music. I have started to write the first part of the poem and have drawn on images, experiences and thoughts generated through the prompts and poems - sometimes an image, sometimes a line or two, at sometimes a full stanza.

From 5 to 7 March the Helmsdale-based arts organisation Timespan will host the True North Conference ‘Recording the Past, Present and Future’. As part of this conference I’ll give a short presentation on my walk along Gormack Burn and the way I’ve used poetry to document it. More information about the conference can be found at Timespan’s website.

Copyright text, poems and image Petra Vergunst

Gormack Burn

Another bank

 Another          

               view 
                                            meandering

How do you generate ideas for creative writing? How do you, after deciding upon the theme, develop a story?

My creative spark in Following the River is Neil Gunn’s book Highland River, but the way in which I will respond to it is only emerging to me slowly. What really stands out for me in the novel is the way the main character Kenn explores the landscape of Dunbeath Water, the landscape that frames and framed his childhood experiences. A walk along Dunbeath Water is certainly something I aspire to, but my walk will be very different from that of Kenn’s as I lack the intimate connection with that landscape. My experience of the strath will be that of a stranger.

I thus need another strategy to explore the idea of walking along a river - I need to find a river that I know well. The landscape around my home is infused by rivers. To the south, the river Dee carves its way east towards the North Sea. Contributing to this river are many burns, among which Culter Burn, an important spawning ground for salmon. The papermill that used to dominate life in Culter up to the 1970s has, however, dammed this burn a mile upstream. Last autumn, a fish ladder was installed just behind my house and the first salmon have explored their way up north along Leuchar Burn and their way up west along Gormack Burn. Interestingly, both of these burns find their source on the foothills of Hill of Fare.

To emulate Kenn’s experience of walking to the source of a river with which he is intimately acquainted, I have decided to walk Gormack Burn from its junction with the river Dee to its source on Hill of Fare. Though I have often encountered this burn on my many walks, I have actually never followed its course as such. By taking pictures and making sound recordings, and by writing poems, my experience of following the course of the river is intensified and my awareness of the river is lifted from something I take for granted to something I’m highly aware of.

Earlier this week I did my first walk along Gormack Burn. The poems this walk generated capture observations, atmospheres, thoughts. I expect the walk along the entire course of the burn to take  around six days, and to generate a series of poems. Among these poems I hope to find the spark that will ignite the storyline for my script.

Copyright text, poem and image Petra Vergunst

New arrivals

To get inspiration for Following the River I have been exploring Loch of Skene the last few weeks.

Journeys

As the autumn evening settles

smoke from scattered chimneys

lies low over fields

cotton warmth

merges with October woods

A walker labours

carved forest paths

to the shores of the loch

The weight of the day’s journey

suppressed by feet

scurrying tired leaves

in storm-strangled groves

Fourteen hours it took geese

to navigate the ocean –

that morning, as they left Icelandic lands

the walker set off

to reach the edge of the water

in time to greet the new arrivals.

Copyright text, poem and image Petra Vergunst

Following the river

A new year, a new beginning.

As the final project for my composition studies with the OCA two years ago, I composed the chamber opera Highland River based on Neil Gunn’s novel of the same name. The idea of journeying – daily journeys, away from one’s childhood landscape, to the source of the river – that is central in this novel  has continued to inspire me. And this was how I started my conversation with Dunbeath Preservation Trust who celebrate the work of Neil Gunn. Two years on this will result in a year-long poetry and composition project around the idea of journeying along a river. Kenn, the main character of Highland River, salmon and geese will be my travel companions. Part of my creative work will take place in Dunbeath, part of in Aberdeenshire river landscapes around my home.

A new beginning. Sparks from previous years have ignited Following the River.

As part of this project I shall be working towards a performance during the annual Light in the North Festival organised by Dunbeath Preservation Trust around the birthday of Neil Gunn in November. In the course of the year, however, I hope to share ideas, compositions and poems in progress as part of performances, readings and walks.

Other blogposts for Following the River:
New Arrivals
Gormack Burn
Poetry as document
Gunn's modern pilgrimage

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

Wish list

November 14

I am raking autumn leaves when father

asks me to give him

my wish list for Christmas

carefully acknowledging each leaf in my pile

This Christmas I want magic

like golden foliage twirling

a twinkling cover of brown earth

This Christmas I want the magic

of opening a present

and feeling like a child

ripping off ribbons and paper

to see whether Father Christmas

has acknowledged his letter

Yet I know,

if I don’t give a list

another pair of socks

will be added to the pile

that I will rake next autumn.

Copyright poem Petra Vergunst

The Miller o' Hirn

A miller, his wife, his son, the mill wheel - and a composer. The ingredients key to Family Business, a contemporary reinterpretation of four of James Scott Skinner’s strathspeys commissioned by sound for soundlab. The music takes performers and listeners on a visit to the Mill o’ Hirn to meet the miller and his family and the Banchory-born fiddle player and composer. Like the original strathspeys are shared informally amongst communities involving various instrumentations, Family Business is composed as a flexible score to cater for the ever-changing group of people who make up soundlab, Aberdeen’s new music ensemble led by clarinettist Jo Nicholson. The work culminates in a session in which the musicians improvise on the original strathspey to emulate the constant renewal and reinvigoration of traditional music by communities past and present. 
                                                       

Family Business is part of a series of composition projects through which I hope to highlight the rootedness of traditional music in communities and places and the dynamic music scene resulting from this, and the inspiration that contemporary classical music can take from this.

Drawing on the four strathspeys by James Scott Skinner and the nursery rhyme The Miller of Dee, the actual score I composed consists of a structure for improvisation. soundlab had its first rehearsal of the work yesterday and I am very enthused to see how the piece has shaped up. A big thanks to Jo Nicholson and the wonderful musicians, and a big thanks to sound for giving me the opportunity to write and stage this work.

The performance of Family Business will be on Sunday 16 November at 4 pm at the Phoenix Hall at Newton Dee Village, Bieldside, Aberdeen. The event is free and tickets are not required. 

Copyright text and images Petra Vergunst