All Things Considered

Ten Walking Songs
Posted by Simon Lewin

A recent posting over at Caught By The River reminded me of a walk we took on the west coast of Scotland earlier in the year (snapshot below).

In this Tracks for Tracks: Ten Walking Songs post, guest selector Robert MacFarlane lists ten "Songs to keep you company. Songs to learn by heart. Songs to lend a beat to tired feet. Songs to yell from the top of a hill..."

Here's an extract about 'The Road To The Isles'...

"The song is a map, really, of the westwards way, from the Southern Highlands to the Western Isles. Its place-names guide the singer-walker westwards, its melody lures him and its rhythm sustains his progress. The song cites the locations that will bring the singer from Tummel in Perthshire to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, by way of Loch Rannoch, Lochaber, Shiel, Ailort, and Morar. Singing therefore becomes a means of navigation. In this way, ‘The Road To The Isles’ has a family resemblance to Aboriginal songline cycles, which describe the ‘dreamtracks’ left by the ‘Ancestors’ at the creation of the world. The route of these dreamtracks – and they can run for hundreds of miles – is preserved in the form of songs, in which each note or phrase corresponds to a landscape feature (a claypan or rock outcrop, say, or turn in a creekbed)." Read in full

Posted by Simon Lewin on September 23rd, 2009