Our latest Common Ground interviewee is Linda Cracknell, a Perthshire-based writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Linda was a columnist on Walkhighlands for several years, and also teaches creative writing. Her moving account of her walks retracing the footsteps of others – Doubling Back – is being republished by Saraband on Thursday 16th May; there will be a launch event in Aberfeldy on 23rd May.
Can you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and your background?
I grew up in Surrey and spent my teenage years escaping suburbia by pedalling out towards open heathland. While studying English literature and fine art in Exeter, I came to Scotland for the first time for a painting week in Assynt. It was an unforgettable midsummer and I was smitten. Mountains began to loom in my life. I worked in museum education for a while and then trained in TEFL and was a VSO English teacher in Zanzibar, East Africa, from where I travelled to climb Mount Meru in mainland Tanzania. Other high places over the years have been a wintry Monte Perdido in the Spanish Pyrenees, Iliniza Norte in Ecuador, Oman’s Grand Canyon, and always back to the Munros of the north-west Highlands.
After all the trips from Devon to Scotland, I moved here in 1990, working in various fields of education in Glasgow, Edinburgh and then moving to Aberfeldy in Highland Perthshire to be education officer for WWF Scotland, and finally living close to the hills. I started writing short stories around that time and when this became more than a hobby, I left the job in 2002 to became a full-time writer and teacher of creative writing. I often take workshops outdoors across Scotland including at the Forest of Birse, Birnam Woods, Dun Coillich and sometimes further afield including in the Marina Baja hills of South-east Spain and, repeatedly, the Moroccan Sahara.
Although mainly a writer of fiction, my non-fiction focuses on different landscapes and walking experiences. Many of the walks I’ve written about in Scotland are collected here by Walkhighlands. I’ve always loved multi-day walks and particularly taking old, trusted ways that winkle through high lands.
How did you first get started? Can you remember your first outdoors trip?
In the introduction to ‘Doubling Back’ I write about my first self-propelled ‘journey’ on hands and knees in the wilderness at the bottom of my childhood garden, thus establishing myself as a solo pioneer! But my first ascent of Snowdon is memorable too, climbed with my mother and siblings when I was seven. My mother always claimed she didn’t intend us to go to the top as we were not dressed for wintry Easter conditions. But as my brother cried every time she tried to turn us around, we continued to the summit to take the train down. Due to deep snow, still falling, there was no train. Going down by the ascent route would have been too dangerous, so we took the long, slow walk down the other side, arriving miles from the parked car. I remember later eating turkey soup in a hotel restaurant and proudly wearing the ‘Snowdon’ badge I had earned.
Coming from a family of walkers certainly laid the foundations of my outdoor life, the need to explore and challenge myself. But my father, an alpinist, died of cancer when I was only in my second year. During my first independent walking trips as an adult, I carried his old canvas knapsack and much later I followed him high into the Swiss Alps.
Can you describe your ideal trip in Scotland?
My ideal walking trip would take me off alone for two or three days with a lightweight tent. It should gain me some height in order to offer geographical clarity and a change of perspective. If it’s a path trodden by others before me, then I’ll feel in league with invisible but trusted walking companions of decades, maybe centuries past. I’ll find an interestingly remote camp spot, cook up noodles and sardines, eat chocolate. There will be good weather, but also an element of challenge.
Walks like these, even in the hills close to home, give me a huge sense of self-sufficiency and peace, and make me feel viscerally alive. I take a walk like this once or twice a year for a ‘reboot’ or maybe to mark a turn of season. When I walk alone, I am a much sharper observer – which is good for writing – and I might note down smells and sounds and sights into a notebook, or snippets of the internal monologue which murmurs along with me on such a walk.
What does getting outdoors mean to you? Is it about challenging yourself, finding out about the world, getting closer to nature, something to enjoy socially, or just a great way to escape the everyday?
Getting outdoors means so many things to me, all those things. It’s a necessity. I need daily walks for health and happiness and also for writing, rhythm, thought flow. I need fresh air. I’ve dabbled with lots of other outdoor pursuits – rock climbing, cross-country skiing, sailing, and currently I’m skiff rowing on Loch Tay. But walking is the constant. It’s an amazing social lubricant too, allowing conviviality or companionable silence. Last year I completed the 650 miles of the South West Coast Path with a dear friend who moved away from Scotland to Plymouth. We walked one week each year – the perfect annual refreshment of a friendship.
Have your outdoors’ experiences changed you in any way, perhaps affecting other areas of your life?
Profoundly. Nearly all my holidays in adulthood have been geared to the outdoors, and friendships often shaped by shared adventure. But above all, my writing life is thoroughly entangled with it. Even when I’m not writing about it for non-fiction, my novels and short stories grow from observations and feelings about particular places. All the imaginative work for my novel, ‘Call of The Undertow’, was walked up whilst discovering the paths, beaches and headlands of the far north-eastern tip of Caithness. The place seemed to gradually offer up to me the characters and the story.
Looking forward, if there was one thing you could change about Scotland’s outdoors – whether that be in something in the environment itself, or in the culture around walking and mountains, what would it be?
I’m going to cheat slightly and have two things, but they are related! I think Scotland needs change to its shockingly concentrated patterns of rural land ownership and greater support for communities or other bodies who might own and manage land in smaller parcels. I can’t help feeling that this would help reduce some of the poor management of deer and sheep which obstructs regeneration of natural habitats.