A visit from Alan and Rae Riach combined with mostly wet and windy weather - currently blowing draughts through the study and the fire is out - has been full of poetry and Scottish independence and New Zealand memories while dear Bar feeds the cows each morning, and then the humans.

I am working on composing a circular piece of music for the shells into bells project, and trying to tidy up Window to the West which Meg Bateman and I have been working on for eight years now and still get on well together! It is "towards a re-definition of the visual in the Gaelic-speaking world" and is crazily ambitious: it is a substantial joint-author book but we have loved doing it. It is holistic and it looks out at the world from here, rather than starting with the world looking in and telling us we are peripheral and remote and isolated and all that nonsense that comes from people living much more lonely lives in cities.

Work also on ogam - a paper to give to Rannsachadh nan Gaidheal in June about this fascinating "alphabet" - simple and phonetic in its basic form, but deliberately obscure in much of its usage. It is visually and structurally provoking and I am making an initial stab at interpreting a manuscript of spells and charms from the 19th-century written out entirely in ogam representing Irish Gaelic. It's a bit like the way doctors used to write prescriptions in illegible Latin so that only they and the pharmacist could actually read them. Trade secrets and so on. Put it this way, I am trying to hack into this manuscript and reveal to an expectant public what is the one and only cure for the evil eye or, if it comes to that, toothache. The truth is my sole qualification for pursuing this is curiosity and the fact that the manuscript has so far been ignored. I hope to annoy enough experts with my presumption into getting them to do something serious about it.

Spring would have y-sprungen, as Chaucer might have it, were it not for cold winds. The soil is not going to warm up in a hurry and if I can locate some Golden Wonder seed potatoes in time, they will still have a chance to chit before there is any point in planting them. We are in process of reforming the lazy beds into raised beds with gravel paths. Alarmingly suburban, but a lot less work for our elderly joints and muscles.

The Te Gheal - our 13 foot Orkney dinghy - needs her fiber-glass keel repaired: too many batterings getting onto the trailer at awkward tides.

As Alan likes to say, "There is still damage to be done!"

Over a year has gone by . . .memorable for the world premiere of Erik Chisholm's opera Simoon in Glasgow - a sensational event after years of struggle to get it done. Also memorable was a performance of his Violin Concerto. Both works will be available on CD in the next year or so. Check out www.erikchisholm.com

My own music got an outing in a presentation I gave at the Calary Church concerts in County Wicklow - many family in the audience - my grandparents are buried by the porch - and later in the year both my music and poetry got an airing at the Nairn Book Festival.

A string quartet commissioned long ago for Victor Rosenberg's quartet course was beautifully played by Mark Wilson's quartet at a concert in Moffat, and I am to talk about my music and landscape as part of the Jon Schueler Symposium at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in late May.

 I gave lectures on music archaeology in Berlin and Vaxjo in Sweden - the latter at a conference in honour of the wonderful Cajsa Lund who was the initial inspiration for my own work in the field. A privilege to be there. Writing up the High Pasture Cave bridge with Dr. Graeme Lawson is on-going. He does his best to keep me on the straight and narrow, most memorably when collaborating over a beer in his boat on the River Nene.


Recently I have been acting as Scottish Music Advisor to the USA tv series Outlander. We had a great recording session for them at Watercolour studios in Ardgour for their composer Bear McCreary. Can't say what we did though as we all signed non-disclosure forms.

Over the last months I've been collaborating with Mhairi Killin and Hugh Watt on Re-Soundings (www.re-soundings.com). They have been turning WWI shell casings into bells and I am composing music for them and for an accompanying exhibition at An Lanntair on Lewis and in Iona. Below is a picture of my musical armoury at Ness Community Centre which appropriately had a WWI exhibition on. Somewhere in there is a box made from a shell casing and engraved with Arabic lettering. It was given to my grandfather who had treated many shell-shocked patients in Dublin. His RAMC buttons are inside it, so now it makes an evocative rattle. The cylindrical shell casings also make remarkably pleasant bells. Ironic or what?

The church above is St Moluag's where we recorded several members of the public who had come to the event, playing the bells as they entered the church. Now I have to make musical sense of it all. Mhairi and Hugh are opening my eyes and ears to new ways of creativity and I am discovering my inner minimalist. But the website will tell you much more.

On the poetry front I had poems published in Scotia Nova (Luath Press 2015) and also in The Hunterian Poems (Freight Books, Glasgow 2015). It's a lovely little publication with an intriguing variety of poetic responses to paintings in the Hunterian art gallery in Glasgow reproduced beside their accompanying poems. It's comfortable to be within the same covers as dear friends such as Alan Riach, Liz Lochhead, Stewart Conn, Aonghas Mac Neacail and Gerda Stevenson. My offering was for J.D.Fergusson's Spring in Glasgow painted in 1942, no distance from where I was born in February of that year. Lesley Duncan picked it for The Herald poem of the day. Is there another newspaper in this country which publishes a poem a day? It is a splendid thing to have and we should be broadcasting a poem a day as well, if only to show that life isn't wasted on us. 

Home again from a trip to Cambridgeshire to consult with Dr. Graeme Lawson on his boat on the River Nene, moored up against the reeds in fenland and with the aid of a couple of beers. Immersed in the intricacies and depths of High Pasture Cave when not being frowned upon by swans, buzzed by a kingfisher, or gathering the hugest ripest brambles overhanging the river. At my daughter and son-in-law's we finished off the revisions to a film script. Happy family days.


Soon off to see Return to the Voice at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - the outcome of the Polish Song of the Goat Theatre group's visits to Scotland and study of Scottish traditional music. They came to Skye to consult and we all had a wonderful time sharing cultures. www.returntothevoice.com

It's about a fortnight since Rod Cameron, baroque flute-maker extraordinaire, came to visit. Always a pleasure, and this time hopefully leading on to a fascinating reconstruction (see below).




I joined the YEStival ceilidh in Ullapool last Saturday to read some poems from Scotia Nova, due out from LUATH press any day now. A heartening event with audience discussion, and musicians, poets, film-makers all giving their services for nothing. I had the temerity to read George Gunn to George Gunn, and read a couple of my own poems which you will also find in Scotia Nova.

The long drive there and back (I took a very scenic route with Applecross thrown in) was enlivened by a young Danish couple to whom I gave a lift. They didn't know where they were going, so they came along with me to join the fun. They had got engaged in the heart of the Cuillin mountains two days before and we listened to Bonnie Rideout playing MacDougall's Gathering as the mountains and sea-lochs pushed the road in every direction. Perfect.

Then back home with the Danes (light rain and midges so camping for them was out of the question) who accompanied me up to Dunvegan on the Sunday where I addressed assembled MacLeods on the prehistory of the music of the clans. A lovely audience from a' the airts: many knowledgeable, all enthusiastic and all ready to purchase CDs. Hurrah!

Monday to prepare to travel early on Tuesday to Pitlochry to meet up with Graeme Lawson and head to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay and meet with Barrie Andrian and discuss a fascinating object from c.400BC closely related to the High Pasture Cave find of a bridge for a plucked stringed instrument.

The Crannog Centre is a fascinating site, well worth a serious visit. Nick Dixon and Barrie Andrian are the leading underwater archaeologists who set it up and run it.

On to Lenzie, over the Campsie Fells, to bring two of my favourite people together for the first time - Graeme Lawson and John Creed, scholars and craftsmen reconstructing ancient instruments. A chance to admire some of John's recent and exquisite work.

Wednesday to Glasgow to meet Stuart Johnston whose publishing company, Kennedy and Boyd, are to bring out my new and collected poems There Is No Night this autumn. That was followed by a lunch with the baroque flautist and PhD student, Elizabeth Ford. She and Rod Cameron are working on the idea of reconstructing the Crathes Castle ceiling flute, for which notion they can blame me, and probably will! Again, such fun!

The rest of the day with family and then to Edinburgh on Thursday to go through all the metal and bone artefacts from High Pasture Cave at the National Museums of Scotland. Graeme Lawson and Fraser Hunter are the experts, but for reasons best known to them, they allow me to don the sticky sweaty rubber gloves and feed fragile objects to the microscope. Some really exquisite workmanship there too. If John Creed had been with us, I can just hear his "Ooooh" and "Aaaah" as a wee beauty of La Tene style repoussee bronze contended for first place with minute sharpest of needles and fine, fine crochet hooks, presupposing the very finest of threads. Then a drive back to Skye that evening, giving my Ford Focus a pat on the facia panel for excellent service after hundreds of miles of sometimes tortuous driving!

Now dealing with the usual requests for information, often really interesting and teaching me things I did not know, but also time consuming. But not consuming so much o0f it that I have not had time to enjoy parts of the Commonwealth Games, and see gallus Glasgow doing its splendid best, and our young Scottish athletes take their places with determination and pride amongst the elite of their kind from all over the world.

And - a parting shot - if anyone thinks the Tunnocks Tea-cakes were naff, I remember fondly a nurse coming to me in hospital at 3.00am when painkillers had failed and sleep eluded me, and offering me a cup of tea. That brightened me up, but the Tunnocks Tea-cake that came with it made me so happy that I do believe I slept until breakfast.

It is over a week since the excellent Rannsachadh nan Gaidheal conference in Edinburgh at which I met many old friends and good colleagues, and managed not to disgrace myself or, I trust, Dr. Meg Bateman in our joint plenary presentation. There were many interesting papers - especially one given by Emma Anderson on early woodwind instruments in the Gaidhealtachd, which appealed to my prehistoric leanings, although she was focussing on the written word and the meaning of the Old Gaelic word stoc.


John MacInnes was there with his wife Wendy and daughter Catriona. John was receiving due accolades for his outstanding work as a researcher, scholar and generous colleague over many decades, and Wendy was very much included in that. A joyous occasion.

Back on the croft we enjoyed our first new potatoes - Red Duke of York, superb with our own fillet steak and courgettes. The cows are out on the Common Grazings, looking sleek and well and no great distance from the bull, which is encouraging. Warm sunny south-westerly winds make this ideal lying-out-in-the-heather weather, of which I have done far too little in my life.

A couple of my poems have been chosen for a new book, Scotia Nova and I will be attending the Yestival events in Ullapool on the 19th and possibly Harris on the 17th to present them and others.

Soon it will be time to prepare a lecture for the Clan MacLeod parliament in Dunvegan on the 20th. This is the Stanley MacLeod Memorial Lecture, so I shall be sporting my ancient MacDougal kilt with pride.

Sun and warm zephyrs and no midges have made these last two days qualify as halcyon days - and yesterday one of our cows gave birth to a fine brunette, named Debbie after a friend who was visiting earlier in the week. I managed to bag and bring in some peats, in between searching for the calf - all our cows give birth out in the open in a place of their choice, so we have to go and search for them to make sure everything is OK, which it nearly always is. Otherwise preparing for my part of a joint plenary lecture my colleague at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Dr.Meg Bateman, and I are giving at Rannsachadh nan Gaidheal in Edinburgh next month.

Hey-ho - still no calves, though swollen udders and rear ends tell us the big events are imminent. A castration of our neighbour's calf was the big event today. 6 weeks old, but a massive fellow and really strong. It took two of us to keep his tail up while the vet did the necessary. I nthink his testicles are still lying out there somewhere for the birds. The birds love such things. At least this calf didn't give out those deep-throated bellowings that you sometimes hear when they are being castrated, and which reach deep into one's masculine soul. Time to get back to 18th-century aesthetics  - or something of that sort.

Back from the Galway Early Music Festival, playing bronze age horn and having a wonderful time with some of the finest exponents of prehistoric music.
Highlights for me were playing with Simon and Maria O'Dwyer for  Moonfish Theatre's delightful shadow-puppet re-telling of Buile Shuibhne - the Mad Sweeney story. The visuals were witty and imaginative and John Rogers read the script splendidly. We improvised the music with minimal rehearsal, but it all went well.

The big event was  Romans & Celts, War & Peace which featured Ludic Scaenic in the first section and Ancient Music Ireland in the second - all playing reconstructions of instruments from 2000 years ago. The final section was a musical battle to which the Festival organiser brought eventual peace - much to my disappointment . . . but it was a privilege to be a part of it all and the sounds in St Nicholas's wonderful acoustic were thrilling, especially when our Celtic section played a healing tune. 

It was great to catch up with one of the most revered figures in Music Archaeology - Cajsa Lund - whose programme of Music on Board the Royal Swedish Flagship Kronan (Lost 1676) was a fascinating musical insight into a tragedy caused by the usual business of an incompetent boss ignoring the advise of the people who actually knew what they were doing.
It was also great to meet Jacopo Bisagni for the first time. He gently corrected me over my mis-remembering of an obscure Old Gaelic tale about triple pipes. I fear he hasn't heard the last of me!

I managed to slip in a meeting with Fergus Kelly, the expert on Early Irish Law. We are blood relations but, I fear, his scholarship is so far ahead of mine that any scholarly relationship would be best described as distant. He was kindness itself. This was on my way to visit family in Co. Wicklow  and climb to the Motty stone with my brother and sister-in-law and see my cousins on the family farm, stocked with the finest sheep and lambs I have seen in ages.
 
Back in Glasgow, an evening chewing the fat with my fellow-students of long ago, John and Lily Geddes, brought back many splendid memories and a chance to hear Irlandaise - a beautiful piece by John for two cellos. The next day, Dr. Graeme Lawson and I took the train to Mallaig and headed home to Skye to discuss the writing up of the High Pasture Cave find of a c300BC bridge for a stringed instrument. This is a project we have long been involved in and the commission to write it up for Historic Scotland gives us a chance to review all the evidence thoroughly. The bridge was found on the Island of Skye, just eleven miles from where I live, and it is a sensational find of international significance.
Now to return to responding to a reader's wise, but challenging comments on an article I wrote for Scottish Gaelic Studies. Being the fool who steps in where angels fear to tread, I am touched that whoever the reader was, has not metaphorically swept me off the stage with one beat of his or her wing. Onward and upward!