57 Comments

The sound of snipe drumming is quite something - otherworldly if you hear it at the quieter ends of the day.

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Oct 31Liked by David Knowles

Ah, Dalriada (spelling?) lives!

Words are magic. Language is what makes us human, in all our many ways.

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Oct 30Liked by David Knowles

Are you kidding? I so enjoy your writing!

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Thanks so much for this: it's not too long at all. Fascinating about the rhythms in Celtic languages. Learning Welsh, it's much the same. Only thing is, being dim, I want to know whether you walked or drove from your old house to Stornoway. Doesn't matter at all, a diolch am y swniau Snipe.

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You are right, Caroline. It is the music of the language that draws us in, once our ears have attuned to it. How lucky we are to still have these languages on our doorstep :-)

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By bus, I hope - it's a long walk from Mangurstadh to Stornoway!

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Hi Caroline, hi again Lynn. Pretty much walked. A magical old lady offered me a lift a few miles up towards Callanish - and it seemed unwise to refuse ;-) But mostly it was a walk of penance, a journey of mitigation. And I'm not unaccustomed to long distances on foot.

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Oh my goodness! A departure from the island that'll never leave you!

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Wonderful writing and I wished it were longer.

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Thanks, Michael. That’s generous of you.

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Wonderful writing and not a bit too long…☘️

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That's kind of you, Ruth. Thanks.

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Loved this. I always love everything you write - and, indeed, the comments you inspire. This substack makes me feel there is hope for the human race, despite everything. :-)

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What a lovely thing to say, Theresa. Thank you. I'll keep trying my best to find the wonder :-)

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I’m a bit late to the ball, but I wanted to tell you how dear your magickal twisting words are to this Canadian who, of course, just *makes up* Gaelic pronunciations. I enjoyed every word, and every step of your journey, and I have an ancient rucksack too, that I inherited from my late father when I was 20, a thousand years ago by my count. Keep well, David. And thank you, always for your work. 🙏🏻

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Hi Heather. That is a mighty gift for a father to leave to you. A rucksack sees it all, keeps it secrets. I might ask to be buried with mine, now that you set me to thinking on it :-)

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Nov 9Liked by David Knowles

Thank you David. It is a mighty gift. This old rucksack has encountered the depths and the heights! I don’t think your idea is all that odd — ancestors were buried with their most prized items, swords, armour, adornments — why not a valiant rucksack?

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Dear David, thank you for carrying me along on this lovely story’s ever-shifting back—over rock and wave, feather, fin and speech—and making me smile along with it. I have been thinking about all that the direction of West holds in our culture and imagination. Autumn is the west-facing season and, as you know far better than I, it was in the west, just over the horizon, that the land of myth lay, the Summerland, the land that would heal all of our griefs and hurts. Bless xo

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You are so kind to worry. I have been struggling to keep to my center during this madness descended upon my country. The enormity of it all can be overwhelming. I am very thankful for your beautiful work and this wonderful community, to help keep me inspired, hopeful and sane over the coming months. Gathering up my inner resources, as I know many of us are. We need to hold onto beauty and wonder and shine our light more than ever. And thank you for that note on returning westward. That’s where the magic is for me right now. xo

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Hi Carmine. I was fretting when you hadn't posted as usual - but then I saw that you had been away with the butterflies (winking allusion to 'away with the fairies' ;-). Hope that filled you up with colour and flutter.

Oh, the west. In Irish Gaelic, at least in the north where I was, they idiomatically say 'ag gabháil siar' to mean 'to go back, to return', which also means literally 'to go west or westward'.

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I am smiling broadly at this David, "They loathe the sticky slime of adjectives and convulse at the impropriety of an action’s attribution." as I sit here marking papers for French on 'l'attribut du sujet' (Moi aussi, je ne les aime pas trop! Especially with so very many errors.) As for the fairies and the wood nymphs, the elves too here, we have also an agreement, I don't speak to them, nor search them out, and they, mostly, ignore me.

"Somewhere between Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy I fell asleep." I know this journey, I think you must, at this point, have been very tired for the road as I remember it, was far from sleep inducing!

Always touched my friend... belated thanks.

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Good heavens, Susie. Haven’t we trodden some of the same paths. And pretended not to have seen some of the same things :-)

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Nov 4Liked by David Knowles

It is becoming quite uncanny David!

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Yes, to the many lovely particulars pointed out in these comments. Mostly I want to tell you, David, and Sharon too, how much I look forward to these Riverwitch weavings in all their swirl and chuck, tenderness and nostalgia. Deep bow, from Cambridge Ontario.

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That's very kind of you, Hele. And also very generous of you to give us the wonderful 'swirl and chuck'. A beautiful turn of phrase :-)

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Thank you, David, for your compelling prose and stories. Your voice around the natural world (Gaelic) and your experiences bring that world forward.

I’m so enjoying this reprisal of the conversations that you and Sharon had in writing a decade ago, and your thoughts now.

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Thank you Lisa, that is generous. You have the most lovely title for your substack. With a name and a heart like that it will surely run and run :-)

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Nov 1Liked by David Knowles

David, I may start writing directly on my Substack feed (glad I nabbed that name!) Now it incorporates all of the posts that I make on my blog, Places of the Spirit, which strongly connects to that theme.

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Reads like a pilgrimage .

Gorgeous and wistful are your written memories .As if you collaborated with ;

“The giant silent swifts of the open ocean, dipping their calligrapher’s wingtip onto the wavetops”

Only your words were written in the land. Then swept away by the winds. I so enjoy when you dive into language. I’ve mentioned a long while ago that my only familiarity with Gaelic is the series Outlander. It is fascinating to hear historical fiction come to life. Oh, and your stories can never too long.

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Hi again, Lor. Thank you for reading so deeply. It's funny - I always feel a sort of tingle when I hear the Gaelic on Outlander. Just reminds me of the time when the beautiful language was everywhere in Scotland and at the forward lines of history. So nimble. So canny.

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Oct 31Liked by David Knowles

Glad to hear the series is doing justice to the language. I wondered.

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Thank you for the journey and the bird walk. The snipe drumming and call were fascinating. When I was a girl at camp in the Southern California mountains, one of the camp jokes was to go on a nighttime "Snipe Hunt", an allegedly mythical creature. Little did I know I would get to hear one drum and creak in the same day many, many decades later. Perhaps that is also covered by 'the clause'!

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Hi again Leslie. Thanks for reading on. I think your wonderful ‘snipe hunts’ are probably covered by the clause :-)

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'The mainland is so unexpectedly heavy'. In that one sentence sits all the sadness and finality of leaving your mystical island. This descriptive and very poignant last journey (even down to the midges!) is almost unbearable - how relieved I was to read your recent continuation and sit with you in that country bus with two old boys from your new life as company. Life in all its glory!

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Thanks for reading again and so deeply, Vanessa. The joys of country buses. Almost like time machines sometimes :-)

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I am so in awe of how words can recreate a landscape, of your ability to do that. As others have said, not one single word too many.

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That is kind of you, Lise.

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