LOCAL LEGENDS

Scotland’s Year of Stories 2022 is encouraging organisations and community groups around the country to find ways to tell the stories that matter to them. Lucy Ribchester picks out some of the events to look out for

Hannah Lavery

Digging up the past takes a literal form in Easterhouse from March to November, where Platform are encouraging local residents to create a living archive called Mining seams and drawing wells. This is just one example of over 70 events in the year supported by the Community Stories Fund – and the events are nothing if not diverse.

For example, Mull and Iona explore their fishing heritage in new film Cliabh An T-Shenachais – The Story Creel, which premieres on the spectacular Fionnphort beach in July. And in Shetland, the year-long If the islands could speak examines Shetlandic resilience and superstition through history and folklore.

In Cromarty, Hugh Miller’s Birthplace Museum will use the 19th-century geologist and folklorist as inspiration for Weaving with Words, a series of guided storytelling walks from April to October covering both Cromarty’s links to slavery and women’s lives during the Victorian era. Belonging and exclusion are also faced head on in Open Book’s Stories Across Scotland, which will use Hannah Lavery’s brilliant, blistering poem ‘Scotland You’re No Mine’ as a springboard to invite marginalised groups – including LGBTQ+ people, refugee women and older people – to write their own stories.

Elsewhere on the east coast, The Phone Box in East Linton is being repurposed as a storytelling venue in August, while nearby in Dunbar, John Muir’s Surviving Childhood! pits participants against an open-air escape room trail while celebrating the famous Scottish conservationist. Also offering a breath of fresh air, Abriachan Forest, in the hills above Loch Ness, is hosting a storytelling event each month, either by the campfire or on a forest walk.

As the nights draw in, autumn sees the ghoulishly named Gossip from the Graveyard II: Talking Heads challenge the public to create stories based on two medieval grave excavations; a priest with a cleft palate and a woman buried on a bed of shells. The winning entries will be made into short animated films and premiered at Wigtown Book Festival, ready to share and hand on to future generations. n visitscotland.com/year-of-stories. For more events taking place as part of the Year of Stories, see pages 14 and 28.