vi: Our Assistant Editor in the Field
Ella Leith meets Sam Harrison Ella Leith
Welly-deep in muck, Sam Harrison is pointing out various wildflowers to a rapt audience of adults and children; behind him, the brae stretches up to dissolve into woodland; below, a glittering river weaves through the wide glen floor. This is Glen Strathfarrar, just outside of Beauly, near Inverness. It’s the kind of spot where you don’t have phone signal, let alone data, and you really don’t miss it. Here, Sam and his family live and run The Shieling Project— a place-based learning centre exploring the natural and cultural heritage of shieling life and traditional outdoor living. The shieling (an àirigh, in Gaelic) is a Scottish example of transhumance— a practice common to pastoral societies across the world —in which livestock are moved up into the hills, or inland from the coast, to graze on the summer grasses. But today, I’m in Malta and speaking to Sam involves a complicated technological wrangling of handsfree Skype calls across two thousand miles. As we speak, Sam is driving south from Helmsdale, Sutherland, and the roar of the A9 is the backing track to our chat. And yet Sam is still in his element. He’s on his way back from setting up a new Shieling Project site, and his enthusiasm is just as compelling and contagious, despite the screech of passing lorries. The Shieling Project, Sam tells me, draws on a particular tradition of land-use in the Highlands: “a tradition of how people used to live and work with the landscape, in the landscape.” At Beltane, the May Day festival marking the beginning of summer, cattle would be driven up from the main settlement, the ‘wintertown’, to the shieling. There, a portion of the community— typically women, young people, and children —would live alongside the cattle for several weeks in temporary or semi-permanent homes, herding them between the best pastures, and making butter and cheese for the winter. Practised in Scotland for at least two thousand years, this way of life declined from the eighteenth century onwards, when the Highlands were aggressively depopulated in the era known as The Clearances. By the twenty-first century, few people— including Sam —had ever heard of shielings.
26
The project was born of Sam’s longstanding passion for place-based learning. About a decade ago, he was working in Argyll: Just me and my backpack, working with schools, going on day trips exploring the places around where the kids lived, and introducing them to the stories, or the place-names, or the Gaelic history, or the plants. And then whilst I was doing that, I was introduced to the idea of the shieling.
