A favourite way of bringing together my professional experience, personal interests & creative practice is to facilitate or lead poetry walks. I’ve enjoyed marking the centenary of Wilfred Owen’s excursions to the Pentland Hills with Craiglockhart Field Club; work for many health-care and active travel charities, organisations and clients; commissions for StAnza (virtually on the Fife Coastal Path during lockdown) and Push the Boat Out (IRL on the Meadows) poetry festivals; workshops for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. I love participating in these events when others lead them, too – experiencing their approach, and the opportunity to make new work myself by following the facilitator’s walking score, route & creative input.

Most recently, Juliana Capes’s descriptive tour of the immediate environs of the Byre Theatre at this year’s StAnza proved an amazing way to spend a Sunday afternoon in St Andrews. And last year my friend, storyteller & poet James Spence, recommended to me the monthly walks in Little France Park, Edinburgh, curated by Jonathan Baxter for ArtWalkPorty. Called Line Walk Mindful Drawing, most of the walking was done in silence, which is my preferred way of doing it: as chatter fades, walkers actually co-create a closer bond as they deepen their engagement with place, attending to the rhythms of footfall and breath, the attuning senses, the slowing down. Jonathan made all participants feel welcomed at the start and included at the end, though, and at the furthest point of the walk, there was a halt for refreshments and discussion.

We got to talking about the sometime plans to create a ‘Pentlands to Porty’ path along the course of the Braid and Figgate Burns, the possibility of which excited me when I moved out of town to settle beside the upper Braid thirteen years ago. (For a recent feasibility study, using the Burdiehouse Burn route from near Swanston-Joppa, see this.) My relocating here happened rather by chance, as I was also looking at flats in Portobello, unable to decide between hills and shore, and could easily have ended up at the latter. The decision I didn’t actively take proved to be the right one for me, able to ground myself at an easy walking distance from the Pentlands, on the edge of the city – never more so than during the lockdowns, when I had space aplenty for my permitted daily exercise, and was far luckier than many in Edinburgh, throughout the country and beyond.

I have to some extent turned my back on the city and its shores, and towards the hills and the Borders, but the water that flows beside my home, changes its name, skirts the residential and industrial fringes of south Edinburgh, and flows into the Firth of Forth at Portobello is a strong part of my place-identity. Its narrative is omnipresent. As usual with the development of creative projects, the gestation of this one isn’t quite clear or linear, but it seemed ArtWalkPorty were interested in doing more work around the coast’s hinterland and feeder watercourses. After more walks and talks, the Braid Walk Project was born, curated by Jonathan, with artist-facilitators Sarah Gittens, James Spence and myself. ‘The story we’ll be telling, or rather, the story we’ll be walking, concerns our collective sense of what it means to live within a climate and ecological crisis, and how walking a watercourse might enable us to live that question now with rejuvenated purpose and joy’.

I’ve begun to make some word-art and word-play around Braid, and started journalling and photographing, as the four of us devise the walk, and weave the strands of our intended input. But we won’t fully know how the idea / image / metaphor will work / play out until we’re joined by the twenty people who can commit to the four walk and two workshop days, and their voices and experience combine along the course of, and join the song of, the Burn. Best commute ever for me; I’m excited to find out!

At the time of writing, the Eventbrite booking page says ‘sold out’ – check back later or contact Jonathan at the email address on the event description for more info if you’re interested.