#mnemonictopographies

After a busy year leaping from one project to another I am looking forward to editing a short film in spring, cloud-cuckoo-island, made in response to the Isle of Eigg. The project currently comprises a cycle of poetic texts and solo performance-to-camera improvisation, exploring madness and mythology, trauma and psychology, in relation to ‘wildness’ and ‘wilderness’. Before shaping the material I have spent some time reflecting; this blog begins in Summer 2013, when I first visited Eigg.

Making cloud-cuckoo-island, reflections on process:

The island was in hyper-green mode, its vitality palpable in blazing wildflowers – lady’s smock, bluebell, ragged robin, red campion, orchid, and yellow flag – lining the ditches and burns with colourful bunting; the air intense with a broad band of birdsong – blackbird, warbler, thrush, wren, a percussive corncrake, and insistent soloist, the cuckoo, ringing out its disyllabic “cuc-ooo cuc-ooo”, hour after hour, over the long midsummer days, like a pendulum marking time. Though his voice was amplified by the basalt ridge, we scarcely saw him.

Being a dabbler at vocal bird mimicry I couldn’t help joining in, calling out a clear, punchy “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo”. It sounded quite convincing, if a little loud. There was a pause, then, from afar “cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo”. Excited by his reciprocation, I called back, keeping it going for longer “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo…” The bird catapulted out of nowhere onto a nearby branch “cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo, cuc-ooo”. Was he talking to me? More to the point, was I talking to him? Not sure of the phrase’s meaning, I responded “ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo, ooo-ooo” – silence – he’d gone. What did he perceive? A super-cuckoo on his patch? Had I scared him off? Without intending, had I claimed his territory, like a clumsy bird-human giant?

I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of the story of Sweeney, the Irish King who became deranged in battle. Fleeing his familiar surroundings, the poet lived on watercress and was comforted by belling stags. According to Heaney’s version, Sweeney carried his trauma off to the wilds, stopping off on the isle of Eigg for a few weeks, staying in a cave loaned to him by St Donan.

What I’d been hearing morphed: the manic invisible cuckoo became a wandering bird-man ‘gone cuckoo’, leaping awkwardly from tree to tree.

On my walks a couple of place-names caught my eye. Down by Laig farm, Na Sìdhean, The Faerie Mounds, and Sìdhean na Cailleach, The Faerie Mounds of Cailleach, combined two ‘otherworld’ figures in Scottish folklore: Cailleach and the faeries.

As a child, I learnt that although fairies don’t exist, if they did they would be small, pretty, winged creatures, darting around hedgerows, bathed in an aura of light that now seems sickly and cloying. The ‘faerie people’ of Scottish folklore, the sìdhichean, are sinister compared to these Victorian figures. They lurk in shadows and dwell underground, in conical-shaped green hillocks known as sìdhean. It was believed that the ancestral dead lived among them; archeology proves some sìdhean were burial mounds, giving rise to the theory that the sìdhichean were a memory of a pre-Celtic culture. In the Nineteenth century, two cists containing bones and a stone axe were found inside the Sìdhean na Cailleach on Eigg.

The sìdhichean are rarely seen, but their malevolent presence is felt. There are stories describing how a human infant, or an adult, was ‘swept away’ to the land of the sìdh, and replaced by a changeling. Sadly, these abduction tales were sometimes used to explain physical and mental disabilities and illnesses. I thought of the cuckoo, that parasitic bird, which invades nests to lay eggs that hatch into a bird-changeling, a gigantic freak compared to the other chicks in the nest, raised by unsuspecting parents. In Gaelic, one of the folk-names for the cuckoo is eun-sìdhe, ‘the faerie bird’. During winter he dwells underground, within the faerie mounds, until the old woman of the hill, the Cailleach, sets him free to usher in spring. In some bird lore traditions the cuckoo shape-shifted into a sparrowhawk for the winter months – no doubt due to their similar appearance. Scientific studies suggest that cuckoos evolved their plumage patterns to assume a hawk-like appearance, to scare the birds whose nests they invade.

In the Scottish tradition, the Cailleach, Gaelic for ‘hag’, is the ancient crone goddess, a giantess who shaped the land. She gives her name to mountains, knolls, rivers, and caves. As the Winter Queen, ruler of the dark months, she personifies the wild and elemental forces of nature and has the ability to metamorphose into birds and animals, most notably raven, crow, and deer. As a protector-ess of deer – her ‘fairy cattle’ – she can shape-shift into a beautiful young woman to lure the hunter.

Perhaps a female creatrix was too much for Christianity? Her matriarchal lore was shattered into fragments – dramatized in stories of witches and wise-women, outcasts who were fossilized in Gaelic place-names. At Laig, she is associated with two low breast-shaped mounds: Sìdhean na Cailleach, The Fairy Mounds of Cailleach – pap-shaped landmarks are often named after her.

Walking along the beach, these correspondences between the human body and the landscape became suddenly all the more striking, for, looking up, the profile of a face formed itself in the skyline at the head of the island – complete with basalt eyebrows and nose. Could this be Cailleach looking out to the spear-shaped Askival on Rum? I could never have discerned the form from the map and there are no surviving place-names for ‘brow’, or ‘head’, but nearby, Guala Mhòr, The Great Shoulder, and Guala Thoinisteir, The Twisted Shoulder, have survived. A spine-like basalt ridge extends south from here, and perhaps it isn’t going too far to say that the thin wisps of cloud, which often shroud the rock, is like the long white hair of an old woman. In my looking, the island had become it’s own original name Eilean nam Ban Mòra – The Isle of the Big Women.

Eigg didn’t feel like a hag: it was a fertile mother, oozing with peaty abundance, brimming with amorous birds. But romance is fleeting: after the passions of summer come the dark months of winter and the departure of the cuckoo; then his return heralds spring, harbinger of cuckoldry, false love and true love.

On the other side of the farm I stumbled upon the entrance to a hidden lochan, known as ‘The Giant’s Footstep’ – but to me the watery footfall belonged to a giantess – Cailleach! Enclosed by basalt and green slopes, the pool felt like a natural amphitheatre, and the wee rushy islets in the water, a stage. On impulse, I decided to sing, throwing my voice at the cliff in short, loud, and high pitch sounds. The effect was amazing: the echo bounced back, not once but twice. The cliff was singing back at me.

I’d experienced something similar up on Skye singing cuckoo-like calls at a small hill in Kilbride. There I shifted into more complex melodies in a long drawn-out improvisation, and the site became another performance Women of the Hill. Here at the lochan footstep I drew on the cuckoo’s repetitions of two intervals, repeating ‘ooo-ooo’ again and again, calling and responding to the echo, mapping the acoustic characteristics of the site with my voice. I knew that the following year I would have to come back and develop a new piece.

And so I did, returning in May 2014 – cuckoo-season – for a week’s residency at Sweeney’s Bothy, snug under the Cleadale cliffs. I was full of good intentions, with seven days to focus entirely on the new vocal composition, but something else happened. A Sweeney-style madness came bubbling to the surface. I spent much of my time helpless, in the throws of dark and sometimes manic depression, plunged into a brain-fog. I couldn’t do any work, no matter how hard I tried, and the more frustrated I got, the more my knotted-up I became. Nothing would flow. I felt trapped and it seemed as if the sky was heavy and looming. My body temperature was all wrong, my head ached or I spaced out, and I lost my sense of joy in the land. I hid away, even though I have friends on the island. Every time I began a new approach, a simple thought, or the seed of an idea, a malevolent voice boomed out in my head: “you can’t do that”, “it’s a stupid, worthless idea”, and “you aren’t good enough to be here”. The guilt spiraled into self-accusation.

What made things even harder was that the Away with the Birds performances were in the final stages of preparation. They would take place on the Isle of Canna, which lay nestled just out of sight, behind Rum. It was my most ambitious project and the accumulation of many years’ work; a ‘coming of age’ that I was prepared for in terms of the production, but now the thought of it actually coming to life felt emotionally charged. Without expecting it I was terrified, not so much by the performances, but out of the blackness, I realised I was confronting permission. The world seemed to be saying ‘yes’ in a way it never had before and my inner critic was echoing back, ‘no’, insistently, ‘NO’, again and again.

Just like Sweeney, I came face to face with trauma. It was not as extreme as his mythic crisis but I recognized the anxiety and dissociation and, for that week, I embodied madness, sinking low, sleepless, and utterly exhausted.

Unlike Sweeney, after the crisis drew to a close, when I left the island, I would find my way out of the spiraling fears.

I felt compelled to honour the experience, terrifying though it had been. And so I began to write.

The cuckoo became my guide – calling out of the fog, calling onto the page – and I hopped, from branch to branch, from the real to the mythic, from myself to Sweeney, and back again.

From a failed work, a new work was born. The cycle of poems that resulted, describes cloud-cuckoo-island, a world that resembles the real bioregion of Cleadale. The landscape is ‘peopled’ by symbolic archetypes: the otherworld is ever-present; lunacy is one step – or fall – away from the euphoria of spring; plants spell out the passage of time in a manic green clock; topography assumes the form of a gigantic woman’s body.

Characters shape-shift: the sparrowhawk is King Sweeney before his spiral into madness; the goddess Cailleach has the power to transform king into fool, hawk into gowk, predator into changeling, taking revenge for humanity’s ego-driven violence.

The final poem sees the mad king and wild woman meet at the lochan shaped like a Giant – or Giantess – footstep. Cailleach, in trickster guise, probes Sweeney’s wounds and brings his psychic torment to the surface. In a contest that is both lamentation and flyting, Sweeney keens for the loss of his family back in Ireland, and Cailleach mourns for the severance of humanity from the wild earth. She ups and takes flight in the form of a crow and disappears. Sweeney, mad as a cuckoo, is left under the cliff calling after her, as the island echoes back. In that mirror of loneliness there is an invitation: Sweeney could listen and, in hearing the island calling, be present, bearing witness to the buried wounds which sustain his madness.

What of my own spiraling? Writing helped me to understand that if I was to fully realise this work, I had to become Sweeney. I may have identified my ‘inner critic’ long ago, as ‘male’, or, in Jungian terms, a ‘negative animus’, but knowing is not understanding, and now it dawned on me that if I could embody Sweeney’s distress, perhaps I could then, finally, attend to my own trauma, and grow beyond my old hurt self to be, like Sweeney, present in the landscape. And so I made my plan to return to Eigg the following Spring and sing Sweeney’s cuckoo-call to the cliffs.

In May 2015 I landed on cloud-cuckoo-island, in the good company of two men, my regular collaborators film-maker Daniel Warren and sound-recordist Pete Smith. With my breasts strapped down to disguise my female form, I wore men’s white thermals and a wig-beard made from hair-moss and a bird’s nest. For sure, I looked absurd and I felt ridiculous, but there was healing to be had sitting on a boulder, singing a wordless ‘ooo-ooo’ at the cliffs, playing with my own echo.

The grass-covered rocks echoed my voice, bouncing back my sound and everything I was feeling. Sonic repetitions punched through the air, peeling back layers of emotion. What started out as preposterous comedy, slowly morphed into vulnerability, to the point where I felt a lump in my throat and tears form in my eyes. There it was, a feeling that could be named: grief, that familiar often repressed emotion. I stayed with it and as my voice went higher and grew louder, I found there was space for a new feeling: acceptance. Here I was, singing my heart out. And it was OK. It was allowed. I’d given myself permission, who else? My voice: an echo of the land.

Coda

After shooting the film on Eigg, I was delighted to hear from Alastair McIntosh that an Eighth century sacred Tibetan text, The Cuckoo of Awareness, teaches that happiness is hidden deep within us all through the total presence of mind.

Photos by Hanna Tuulikki and Alec Finlay Film stills by Daniel Warren Drawings by Hanna Tuulikki

Bibliography: 

Aristophanes, The Birds Edward A. Armstrong, The Folklore of Birds Angela Bourke, ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry’; essay in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture John Chester, The Birds of Eigg Mark Cocker, Birds Britannica Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of The Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer John Gregorson Campbell, The Gaelic Otherworld I.F.Grant, Highland Folk Ways Camille Dressler, Eigg: The Story Of An Island Alec Finlay, Sweeney on Eigg Marja Gimbutas, The Living Goddess Francesca Greenoak, British Birds, their Folklore, Names and Literature Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora Seamus Heany, Sweeney Astray C.G.Jung, The Red Book Breandán Ó Madagáin, Keening and Other Old Irish Musics Michael Newton, Warriors of the Word Anne Ross, Scottish Folklore

Sweeney's Bothy is tucked under the magnificent cliffs of Cleadale on the Isle of Eigg, hosting a range of residencies and public rentals. Created by The Bothy Project in collaboration with artist Alec Finlay as part of Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland 2013. Visit The Bothy Project website here.

Laig Beach Bothy is a family sized bothy on the edge of Eigg's  Laig Beach, Laig Beach with views out to Rum, available for public rentals here.

Heart-stone and bell 2014 (photos: Hannah Devereux)

Bronze bells cast from a stone found in the River Lyon, with cord of hair moss

Making heart-to-heart, reflections on process:

The River Lyon winds through the glen like an artery. Alluvial deposits nourish the valley, and, in among birch woods, sitka plantations, and hidden orchards, there are remnants of the ancient pines of Caledon. Glen Lyon is said to be named after the Celtic sun god Lugh. Today, in August – Lugh’s sacred month – with sunshine filtering through dappled green, let’s call the glen The Valley of the Sun God.

Heart-stone (photo: HT)

Wading in wellies by the old arch-bridge at Chesthill, I watch rays and eddies play on the riverbed. My eye’s caught by a heart-shaped stone, light-filled patterns of blood vessels undulating over grey: could this be a heart from the otherworld – that mysterious Gaelic otherworld concealed just beneath the surface of things? Reaching in, breaking the meniscus, my hand launches ripples, cold wavelets shivering up my arm, I pick the stone out from its setting. The heavy heart is in my hand. Its body is smooth and, exposed to the air, light lessens its rippling play; for moments the sparkler is a gemstone, or a piece of molded metal, then, warmth absorbs the wetness and its complexion changes, fading to a dry stane of this world. 

Gleann Cailliche map (photo: HT)

There are sacred sites scattered throughout the glen – the Fortingal yew, standing stones, saints’ stones, ancient dùns and Adomnan’s bell. On either side of the river, they align with each other and the surrounding mountains. Most intriguing of all is Taigh na Caillich (literally House of the Old Woman, sometimes known as Tigh nam Bodach - House of the Old Man) a stone structure in an adjacent glen, north-west of the Lyon. Gleann Calliche has a higher altitude and less forgiving environment, and it is the only glen in Scotland named for the Old Hag creatrix Cailleach, goddess of winter. The taigh, Gaelic for ‘house’, was once part of a shieling where women would drive the cattle to pasture and stay the summer. This practice of transhumance allowed the valley to replenish and crops to grow. The shrine, or ‘wee house’ as some call it, resembles a miniature bothan airigh, a sheiling-bothy, with low stone walls and a turf roof. It houses a ‘family’ of “dumb-bell shaped” river-worn stones that resemble human forms: the calliach, her husband bodach, and their daughter nighean, along with four other “children” – the number varies with a new one said to be added every 100 years. 

Taigh na Caillich, August 2013 (photo: HT)

These figurines and their wee house are associated with fertility and the old Celtic calendar, which revolved around the agrarian cycle. On May 1, Beltane, the taigh is opened and the stones are washed and placed outside the doorway. Before Samhain, November 1st, they are put away for winter, and the entrance is sealed. Marking the cyclical seasons, it would seem that this ceremony has remained unchanged for thousands of years. The ritual was believed to bring good fortune to the crops and protect the animals of the glen. 

HT, Gleann Cailliche, May 2014 (photo: Hannah Devereux)

Having walked out to the Taigh in different seasons, I am struck by the character of the two glens: Caillich, colder, wilder than the gentle Lyon; when May-warmth blooms in Lyon, Callich’s mountain-tops are still snow-covered and, in October, lacking the woods of her neighbour, Caillich feels bleak. In August I crouched in the Taigh while a storm blustered over.

Allt na Callich, August 2013, Photo: HT

A few steps from the Taigh, the Burn of Cailleach, Allt na Callich, rushes by. Swollen with snowmelt, so white that the riverbed is often hidden, it gouges its course south-east, to its confluence with Allt Meurain, Branching Burn. The rivers form a single blood vessel feeding Loch Lyon, which feeds the arterial River Lyon, and disperses minerals through the glen. Since the construction of a hydro-dam in the 1950s, the loch’s outline has changed: the heart-in-a-mountain-torso, harnessed for its generative power.

Figurines, May 2014, photo: Hannah Devereux

The significance of this fluvial movement from the heart of one glen to the heart of the other, suggests the fertility ritual at Gleann Calliche was – still is– intimately connected with the seasonal regeneration of Glen Lyon. Were the figurines guardians of this process? Was the creatrix hag, Cailleach, nurturing the sun god, Lugh, bringing vitality to his valley?

Killin Stones, November 2013 (photo: HT)

In 2013, my partner Alec began working on a commission to create a National Organ Donors memorial at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Researching traditional healing practices associated with stones – his ‘organs’ – such as those pictured above, in nearby Killin, he intended to create a living memorial, containing a collection of organ-shaped stones, which we had started to gather in August, in Glen Lyon. 

Alec Finlay stone collecting from the River Lyon, October 2013 (photo: HT)

Wishing to create a place for families of organ donors and the organ recipients to remember their loved ones, a space that felt safe for reflection, he was drawn back to the Taigh and Glenn Cailliche, by its form, living turf roof, rites, and its use, as a place to keep stones safe. This might be the structure he was looking for?

Taigh na Caillich, August 2013 (label: AF, photo: HT)

Alec couldn’t walk out to the Taigh – his pneumo-muscular illness prevents him from walking far – so, I offered to go for him, committing to memory what I saw, and photographing poem-labels. I was moved by my own walking for Alec, being his eyes and ears and by participating in a pilgrimage that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Gleann Cailliche, August 2013 (photo: HT)

Making my way west, by the loch, I drifted between thought and sensation. After I had forded the river I could feel the regenerative power of the glen. The hills, a ribcage with breathing lungs and a beating heart; narrow capillary streams, red from minerals, running off the hills into Allt na Caillich.

How should I make a private performance, or gesture, to acknowledge the significance of this place – my own kind of healing rite, a sonic offering to the Cailleach of Glen Calliche?

Heart-stone (photo: Hannah Devereux)

Back in my studio, the heart-stone found a place on my desk. I had wondered if it should belong with the organ-stones that were being collected but, for now, I wanted to see if other meaning emerged. So it sat there for months, sometimes a paper-weight, sometimes lost under drawings. Occasionally it moved to the mantelpiece, joining the collection of stones, pebbles, and bones. I’d pick it up and hold it, running my fingers across the surface smooth from water, noticing wee dents and marks, how it was flat on one side and curved on the other. Upside down, it looked like a hand-bell waiting to be played and reminded me of the taigh’s dumb-bellshaped figurines.

Alec Finlay's taigh and wilding garden, National Memorial for Organ and Tissue Donors, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (photo: Hannah Devereux)

Alec’s memorial proposals had resolved: a dry-stone structure based directly on Taigh na Caillich’s, with the organ stonesburied under the turf roof. The artist Caroline Dear would create wrappings anda ‘shroud’ for them to sit on. He invited me to contribute a performance, maybe in Glen Lyon or Glen Caillich, celebrating the relationship of those places to the memorial in the Botanics.

Out of Away with the Birds, I was beginning to explore the ‘Mnemonic Topographies’ of place, unearthing the layers of ‘lore’ embedded in landscapes, animating resonant spaces with site-specific performance. Bewitched by Glen Caillich I was keen to compose something fitting for such a remarkable place.

Caroline Dear's ropes July 2013 (photo: HT)

My inclination was a vocal offering, drawing on the traditions of keening – a composition to sing the departed away – but I had sung, briefly, in Glen Caillich, and my voice vanished in the wind. Something less familiar to me was needed, and I thought of a votive offering for the rivers. Admiring Caroline’s work with natural materials, and her pieces exploring the figure of Bride – another Celtic goddess come Christian saint – I invited her to collaborate. 

Bottle with water from Allt na Callich embedded within the Edinburgh Taigh's walls (photo: Hannah Devereux)

Walking back out to the Taigh at Samhain, Caroline and I collected a small bottle of water from Allt na Callich to be embedded in the walls of the Taigh at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and chatted about what we knew of votive practices from different cultures. The possibility of making our own offering, meditating on the life-giving qualities of Cailleach’s glen, took shape. Perhaps a woven material form could be drifted along the carrying stream, like one of Ana Mendiata’s floating goddess sculptures, or, drawing upon the Scottish clutie well tradition, rag-wishes could be tied to the few rowan by Cailliach’s burn.

Caroline said something that stayed with me:

whatever we do

it has to come from the heart

Returning to the heart-stone in my studio, its bell-like guise suggested I cast a bell in bronze, transforming solid stone into a hollow that sounds, giving voice to rock. Often described in terms of the body, with lips and tongues, bells have long been thought of as having the gift of speech. In pastoral cultures bells are tied to herd animals. Around the world, bells are used in seasonal rites and festivities, as aids to meditation, calls to prayer, and warning alarms. Played mechanically, or by hand, bells sign phases and tell time.

Heart-bell (photo: Hannah Devereux)

The heart-bell cast could be modeled on a number of different types of small bells. Sounded by an internal clapper, or ‘tongue’, hand and animal bell forms appealed. However, to work, they would require a specific structure – narrow at the top and wide at the base, so the heart would need to be turned upside down, losing its familiar shape. An alternative was the Tibetan ‘tingsha bell’, traditionally used in meditation or, in my case, during vocal warm up exercises. Made from twin pieces of concave cast metal, threaded together with leather, they are played by striking the two halves together. The cast would need to be split in two, one half-heart sounding the other half-heart. Perhaps Caroline could make a thread, a connecting artery to link them?

This form could work well, the symbolism resonating with acts of donation, regeneration, organs, body, and land. But it was a risk: the stone wasn’t symmetrical, and the Tingsha bell demands identical pieces; then again, the lack of symmetry might lend itself to acoustic discoveries.

Heart-bell (photo: HT)

On Valentine’s day 2014, I took the stone to Powderhall foundry, where the technicians made a plaster mold from the stone, and, splitting it in half, created two hollow bronze casts, a few millimetres thick. A month later, I went back to collect the finished objects. Lifting them from their mold, the half-hearts shone, their surface still untarnished by a defining patina. This would be added, wearing away the dark coating with a metal scourer, revealing the fine texture of the original stone. 

Heart-bell (photo: HT)

First it was time for the real test: how did they sound? Holes were drilled into the body, and stringing the pieces together with a leather thread, I held them up and gently let them strike together, heart-to-heart. What a relief – they chimed beautifully, with two close but distinctive notes, ding ling… ding ling…  an otherworld heart beat, lub dub... lub dub…

Caroline Dear making thread (photo: HT)

To join the split-heart together, Caroline made a cord of red Hair Moss, long enough to wind around the player’s fingers and wrist, like veins or tributaries, transforming hands into hills and valleys. She also made a beautiful pouch, lining it with moss to keep the bell safe.

Caroline and Hanna holding the heart-stone (photo: Hannah Devereux)

At Beltane 2014, we made a return pilgrimage to Callieach’s glen, where, at the Taigh, we made our offering: including the heart-stone, wrapped in purple-moor grass, tucked into the wall, near the entrance, along with a small bottle of water from the Botanic Gardens, from the pond by the Memorial. 

Ringing the heart-bell (photo: Hannah Devereux)

For our ‘sonic-offering’, we rang the bell over the burns and rivers that feed Loch Lyon from which the river flows.

vessel – heart – artery

We gave our well-wishes to the rivers, to the heart which replenishes the neighbouring valley, just as the gift of donation nourishes life.

Ringing the heart-bell (photo: Hannah Devereux)

The heart-to-heart bell-ringing was photographed by Hannah Devereux and filmed by Daniel Warren, footage of which I plan to edit into a short audio-visual work.

Caroline Dear, Hanna Tuulikki and Daniel Warren (photos: Hannah Devereux)

The bell was rung during the ritual laying out of the 'organ' stones in March 2014, and at the official opening of the Organ Donors memorial in September 2014, with one heart-beat to mark each person who has donated an organ or tissue.

Alec Finlay, Caroline Dear and Hanna Tuulikki (photos: Hannah Devereux)

+read Alec's blog Memorial: remembrancing

+buy the book that accompanies the memorial Taigh: A Wilding Garden