A Place-aware Walk


 
Gathering is an innovative mapping of the Highland landscape in poems, essays, photographs, and maps, conceived by Scottish artist and poet Alec Finlay. The work guides the reader to modest and forgotten places in this complex region.

Finlay worked from Adam Watson’s published collection of names, one of the most significant modern contributions to Scottish folk-culture consisting of over 7,000 local place-names, covering every ruined farm, shieling, hill, glen, spring, burn, and wood in the region. Over a period of years, Finlay expanded Watson’s catalogue into a generous ‘ecopoetic’ and ‘place-aware’ account of the Cairngorms, accompanied by photographs showing the hills in all their seasonal variety. Essays guide the reader to names that reveal the haunts of wolves and wildcats, and cast a vivid impression of the great pinewoods that once grew there, and may again.

  
With these local names as a guide one becomes aware of a wonderful range of locations that have been overlooked – forgotten shielings (summer huts), and springs, or lost forests, as well as modest patches of berries, and places that have names because they were once useful to peasant farmers. I term this approach place-awareness, and I hope it will give readers a new appreciation of the region.’ - Alec Finlay

A multitude of perspectives – of the walker, hiker, climber, stalker, gun, forager, birdwatcher, and geologist – are gathered together, weaving varied perceptions of the landscape and revealing the ways in which these reflect human uses and human desires. By combining poetics, ecology, and folk-cartography, Finlay’s ‘place-aware’ philosophy offers readers and visitors alike a remarkable new insight into this evocative and vulnerable landscape.

 
Gathering was created for The Fife Arms hotel, located in Braemar within the heart of the Cairngorms, which will reopen in December 2018 after a complete restoration.  Finlay has contributed to the names of the hotel’s 46 rooms and suites, with each room a homage to a place, person, event or activity with links to Braemar. Finlay’s artwork will feature throughout the hotel, and his poems will be carved into the wooden headboards in some of the guestrooms.

Gathering is now available from Studio Alec Finlay.

  
bibliography
Adam Watson: The Place Names of Upper Deeside
Adam Watson: Place-names in much of North-east Scotland

Gathering was commissioned by Hauser & Wirth, for the Fife Arms Hotel, Braemar; the project was launched in 2015 and will conclude in 2018.