Caught by the river – Blog Series – #2 Robert Mcfarlane

On Friday 25 May, some of the UK’s best loved writers and musicians form a cracking line-up for the Caught By The River Variety Show.

The show features live music from Diagrams, Tim Burgess discussing his new book, Richard King reading from his account of the history of independent music – ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Culture Show presenter – Michael Smith, and more.

In the second part of our blog series, we have an extract from Robert Mcfarlane’s new book The Old Ways. Macfarlane’s work documents his explorations into British landscapes, mountains, moors, islands, salt marshes, and sea-caves, writing about modern society’s relationship with the wild.

Two Augusts ago, I joined a crew of five sailing an old open boat from the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, to the remote skerry-island of Sula Sgeir, which lies forty miles due north of the northernmost-point of Lewis – far out into the Atlantic.

Sula Sgeir’s form is geological-brutalist. It is a jaggy black peak of gneiss, the topmost summit of a submarine mountain, and it is home to ten thousand gannets and (until recently) the only albatross in the North Atlantic. The sea has bored clean through the southern part of the island to form a series of caves and tunnels. In big Atlantic storms, the waves break over its summit.

The boat we sailed to Sula Sgeir was called Jubilee, she was seventy-five years old, and she was a sgoth Niseach: a class of Lewisian working boat, lug-rigged, clinker-built, double-ended and open, designed for sturdy seaworthiness up there off the Butt of Lewis where the Atlantic currents meet the currents of The Minch. She was skippered on our voyage by Ian Stephen – sailor, poet, story-teller and life-long follower of the sea-roads – and under Ian’s safe steerage we sailed her overnight to Sula Sgeir, up through an ocean of phosphorescence and stars, at last reaching the skerry at dawn.

The story of that unforgettable journey is told in full in a book called The Old Ways. A year or so ago, though, I was fortunate enough to be put in touch by Jeff Barrett with Chris Watson – the sound-artist, natural-history sound recordist, and Caught by the River favourite. Jeff had it in mind that a collaboration might develop, and so it has. At the Caught by the River Variety Show at the Southbank on May 25th, Chris and I will be performing a sound-story of that voyage – the text spoken by me over a bedding track, with Chris drawing on his extraordinary sound archive to respond to and improvise out of the words themselves. Our aim is nothing more or less ambitious than to evoke the profound and abiding strangeness of sailing that old boat up that ancient sea-way into that vast ocean to that lonely island – and to carry our listeners with us.

What you will hear, therefore, might best be imagined as a dream-voyage or wonder-journey – what in Gaelic is called an immrama – and in this sense precedents for it might be found in very early Celtic sea-stories: the lyric accounts of Mael Duin or St Brendan, say, sailing their hide-hulled boats westwards and northwards, out of the verifiable and into the miraculous.

To buy tickets for this events and check out the full line-up, click here.

Caught By The River – Blog Series – #1 Chris Yates

Popular nature and culture website Caught By The River celebrates it’s 5th year at Southbank Centre with a fantastic line-up of writers and musicians.

Caught By The River began in summer 2007 as a website based solely on a handful of passions shared by the people behind it. Angling, music, books, films, nature and pubs to name a few.

We’ll be posting passages, reviews, competitions and music over the next few weeks in the lead-up to the show.

Chris Yates – an angler, photographer and acclaimed writer will be reading from his new book Nightwalk, raises his gaze from his beloved rivers and ponds and takes us on a mesmerizing tour of the British countryside.

You can read an extract from Nightwalk on the Caught By The River website.

To buy tickets for this events and check out the full line-up, click here.