The Travelling Tern

For my next storytelling project knew I wanted to make a book from scratch – write it, illustrate it and bind it and design the cover and I also knew I wanted it to be a homage of sorts to my previous home of Ferryden – a small historic fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. In my illustrations I include the wee fisher cottages lining the shore with the washing lines strung out over the Esk estuary, as well as the majestic Stevenson lighthouse a mile out of the village which sits at the headland of Scurdie Ness, towering over the lava rocks which form many rockpools. The setting really could be any north eastern fishing village in Scotland, but I clearly saw Ferryden in my mind when writing the story. If you are interested in reading the story I published it on my blog here . The lighthouse keeper's cottage in my illustration however has a distinct west highland look, and certainly not typical of an east coast cottage at the time. I based it on the traditional kind of ‘...

    As a small side project I wanted to respond to a herbal folktale using only photography. I love the cyanotype process and I had in mind a story collected from master storyteller and Scottish Traveller Duncan Williamson. This particular story is set on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides and centres around a particular species of seaweed known locally as fair maid’s tresses – chodra filum I think. You can read the story published on this blog with kind permission from Linda Williamson here . But what are cyanotypes and why do I love this form of photography so much? Basically, a cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20 th century as a simple low-cost way to produce copies of their drawings – this is where the tern ‘blueprint’ comes from. The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. Although the process was discovered by Sir John Herschel he c...

By Duncan Williamson in Land of the Seal People (Birlinn, 2010) Copyright: The Estate of Duncan Williamson "When I left home at thirteen years of age I spent more time along the Hebrides. Now if you were to spend some time on the West Coast and the Hebrides, Islay and Jura, Tiree and Barra; well, there’s a lot of edible seaweed along the West Coast of Scotland, dulse, and people go crazy for that kind of stuff. Sea lettuce it’s called. There’s two different kinds, the brown and the blue. But there’s another kind of dulse that people wouldn’t eat, it’s known as Fair Maid’s Tresses. Now you know, Fair Maid’s Tresses is edible, but getting anybody to eat it would be a problem. Because it’s only found in one particular area, one place in the world, and that’s around the shores of Barra. There’s a great legend attached to the Fair Maid’s Tresses a long time ago, and I’m about to tell you what took place. You see, the’re not many cliffs in Barra, well, some parts are kind o...

Told by Duncan Williamson (1928-2007), Scottish storyteller Copyright: The Estate of Duncan Williamson   ‘Away back in the West Coast a long time ago there once lived a lighthouse keeper. He lived on the mainland and he had a wife and two children. But every four months he used to go out to the lighthouse on a rock off the coast. And the keeper was in that lighthouse on the rock for three months at a time. It was a hard time to be a lighthouse keeper in these days because the pay was poor and you were cut off from everybody; you never saw your relations, you were very lucky if a boat ever came to you. Now this old keeper’s name was Peter McKinnon. He came back to the mainland for a month after his time was served on the Rock; he called it ‘the Rock’. One night I was lucky to meet Peter in a pub. He was a wee bit upset as he sat in the barroom of this wee pub. And I could see by the way he told this story to us – we were sitting round the table listening – that he really belie...

  A long time ago there lived a young girl who lived by the sea. Her name was Rona and the tiny village she called home clung tightly to the coast. There was nothing much between the wee fisherman’s houses and the sea apart from a rocky shoreline where the villagers tied up their skiffs at night.   Rona had no mother and they say that when she died, Rona’s father’s heart turned to stone and he was no longer the same man who sang songs and told his children stories. He worked at sea, he fished and drank and smoked his pipe staring out to see for long periods of time – and not much else beyond that.   Rona had a lot of brothers and sisters and they all lived in a tiny fisherman’s cottage which had only two rooms. Space was so tight Rona and the younger siblings slept in fishing nests which hung from the roof, while their father slept in a small box bed in the other room.   Her oldest sister Agnes was the one who looked after all the children in the househol...