Writing landscape by Linda Cracknell

Saraband (2023) £8.99

A Review by Kenny Taylor

People who know the village of Aberlady and the huge sweep of bay that flanks it will be aware of its natural beauty. Mudflats glistening at low tide, where flocks of wading birds swirl and call overhead and the breeze brings tangs of salt spray and seaweed: those are part of land and sea and sky here. But I also connect Aberlady with something harder to define, but no less fascinating – the ways that the act of walking in certain places can be a catalyst for creativity, including ideas for writing.

The bond between outer and inner here comes through the prolific historical novelist and non-fiction writer, Nigel Tranter, who lived in Aberlady until his death in 2000. Many years back I was told how local walks were fundamental to his writing practice. An account online through East Lothian’s John Gray Centre describes how the author would start each day with a walk across the wooden bridge at Aberlady Bay, which he called ‘The Footbridge to Enchantment.’ He was a familiar sight walking on the coast, says the website, “stopping to jot down neat notes for his books on cards or even shells picked up from the beach.”

That sense of a writer inspired by both a place and the act of walking in it, not simply to describe a scene but to generate wider thoughts, glows from each essay in Linda Cracknell’s collection Writing Landscape. Based in Highland Perthshire for nearly three decades, with a writing career given early boosts from winning the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story prize and a Brownsbank Fellowship, Linda’s work has focussed increasingly on non-fiction. This includes her warmly received Doubling Back - Paths Trodden in Memory now usefully republished in a revised edition by Saraband (2024).

Writing Landscape, also published by Saraband in the imprint’s ‘In the Moment’ series, is both a set of essays and in some ways like one, extended essay. The places where walks (and overnight camps and occasional swims) occur are varied, such as Birnam, Erraid, Fontainebleau (through a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship) and Edinburgh Old Town, but there are both underlying connections and pleasing contrasts and diversions in them. It’s a bit like joining the writer in her stravaiging as she notices something just off the path and stops to ponder it and – crucially – to write down her response.

“The small weight of a notebook and pen in my pocket is my passport to feeling alive;” she says, “I cannot but be in the moment when translating observation and experience into words.”

For those interested in ways of using the outdoors to help generate ideas for their own writing, this will be a useful sourcebook. But it’s not a ‘how to’ guide. The quality of the prose and the ways in which the writer responds to different places make reading each essay a pleasure. To get a taste, go to the Northwords Now online author archive and seek-out The Writer, the Island and the Inspiration. Set on Erraid (another RLS place) and first published here in Issue 41, it's now the largest work in the recent essay collection.