Celebrating Creative Writing, Community & Gaelic on World Poetry Day
Sgrìobh is a book festival ‘celebrating Scotland’s languages’ in Kilmuir, Skye (Sgrìobh, 2025). As it is World Poetry Day today I thought I would make this blog piece which includes my first poem with the inclusion of some Gaelic words, written during an Open Book Gaelic creative writing workshop at Sgrìobh.
I am not a Gaelic speaker, but my granny was from Achill Island in County Mayo and spoke Irish Gaelic. Though she seldom spoke it to us, the words would sometime tumble out in the heat of the moment. I had Gaelic lessons in primary school and even sang in a Gaelic choir but that was as far as my experience with the language went until spending this time conducting my fieldwork in Skye this year.
Kilmuir village is around 20-30 mins from Portree in the northern part of the Trotternish peninsula in Skye. I arrived at 1pm after driving the last stretch along a windy road single track road up from Uig. At points it looked like the road was wishing itself off the side of the cliff. I haven’t spent time in Skye before where the sun has peeked out of the clouds for longer than a few minutes and I positively basked in it. My face welcomed the warmth which was slight but perceptible to the skin.
Inside Kilmuir hall, they were still doing readings so I was glad about not missing the start of the workshop. There were around 30 to 40 people in the hall listening to the readings and everyone was very welcoming. The community hall is about the same size as the Breakish hall (though I may recollect this incorrectly for those who know it well) which I went to the night before for a film screening, organized by ATLAS Arts.
The Open Book workshop took place in a little room off to the left of the main hall. With more interest in this workshop than I think was anticipated, we squeezed into the room around a central table. Katharine Macfarlane with Shelagh Chaimbeul introduced the workshop in Gaelic and English as this was a multilingual event. Katharine and Shelagh started us off by asking us to read out loud some poems that they had selected, I think to warm our minds up to some of the ideas that they were using to set the workshop around and the central theme of bridges. The poems were great at getting us to think about community and culture and the connections we make – physical or emotional. We then came up with a collective word bank where everyone participating offered some words that they connected with the theme of bridges, as barriers or as connections for example. Some of these were Gaelic words which I liked the sound of even though I wasn’t entirely sure of what they meant at first but when asked, folk gave me some meanings for them – Drochaid is Gaelic for bridge, Allt is a burn or a stream and Briste is broken. Katharine and Shelagh said that we could feel free to use some of these words in our writing. And so we began our first writing session which was ten minutes long. This is what I came up with:
Cross Drochaid Allt Briste
Through the stars and light we travelled
The sky dark and wide
but so bright the spots of light strewn across the black
Cross drochaid allt briste
The bridge felt angry to be stood there so long so unappreciated its' feet always wet
for ever
The crossing was long and treacherous
A deep ravine with water crashing and echoing below
The spray misting the air all around
We moved slowly then
knowing of the place we hoped it would take us
to a time before
before mobile phones, the internet, microwaves
Wizardry which set the world ablaze with faulty words
Skewed and laundered by the trolls in power
uncaring, untruthful, plain wrong
Algorithms amplifying incorrect truths
Falsehoods
Twisted realities for political gain
We hoped for the place we once knew
of green forests, snow in winter, sun in summer
carefree days playing in the barley fields
simpler times when to ring someone at the phonebox as your teeth chattered
meant something to you and the receiver.
That world is gone
destroyed
left un-protected from computing gone wild
the internet and growth at all costs.
The sun peeked out of the clouds
we could glimpse our new home
If only the bridge stayed fast
After the time was up we were asked if we wanted to read out our writing. I offered up my reading of my freshly minted poem and was struck by how I felt when I was reading it, growing more nervous as I spoke each word, each line, struggling it off the page and into the room. But in that space, to participate in that workshop I felt that reading out the results was a necessary part of the collective experience, unique to that moment and that assemblage of people around the table. In that shared experience of understanding more about ourselves through our writing, in both Gaelic and in English, the values generated by community writing and the sharing of writing through the readings we heard during the day and the discussions that people were having was amplified for all.
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