Fonn Na Tire, The Land Song of Scotland
April 2026
By Jackie Thoms
In November 2024 I visited a sacred site on the Isle of Bute.
Something in that place called strongly to me, a call that would become a five-day gathering: Fonn na Tìre – “the Land Song of Scotland”. In this gathering we explored keening, piping, poetry, story and listening to land through older Scottish ways of practice. I helped weave and facilitate the gathering in response to that earlier encounter, and the week itself unfolded as something deeply heart-opening and co-created with those who came.
We were hosted on a powerful sacred site on Gib Bulloch’s land. The sense that the land was hosting us was palpable and beyond what we could fully understand. The space was profoundly loving and gently held by Madge Bray whose work weaves music, language, humour, grief and deep cultural memory through song, poetry and story. Through the subtle and expansive musical work of Malin Lewis the priobroch (bagpipes) opened us into an expanded emotional depth allowing grief, beauty and complexity to move through us in sound in ways that felt both ancient and immediate.
We learned to drone with the human voice, listening to the subtle movement between harmony and dissonance and exploring how keening reconnects the human voice with grief that has long been suppressed. The banning of keening in 1642 marked a deep interruption in cultural expression across Scotland. Part of the gathering explored how that grieving voice became absorbed into the pipes and what it means now to bring the human voice back out again for collective grieving.
Through pibroch traditions, ancient songs and stories of the Cailleach, we encountered a way of relating to landscape that is participatory where story, place and memory remain alive together. Figures such as the Cailleach persist because they live across multiple levels: as myth, as explanation of landscape and as presences carried through language, music and memory. The local stewardship of the land by Jessica Herriot and Susan McKay made this depth of practice possible.
Across the week we practised listening to land through song, walking, sounding, pilgrimage and shared silence in forests of moss and ancient trees. Through collective droning and sounding with the pipes on the sacred site, we experienced moments where the shared field of listening shifted perceptibly. The layered tones seemed to open a different register of attention, one in which grief, presence and place were held together in a wider space than words usually allow. It felt like entering a threshold where something false could fall away and where deeper truths were present through resonance and relationship with land.
We were there to be in practice with ancient ways of listening through keening, pipes, sacred sites and story, and to experience how grief can be held together: personal grief, cultural grief and the grief of our times. Held collectively, grief did not close us down. It opened into warmth, connection and a surprising sense of joy and expansiveness.
More here: Madge Bray – Traditional Futures
The gathering itself felt emergent and co-created by those present. It offered a glimpse of what becomes possible when older practices of relationship with land are lived again as something still unfolding now. The container held the week with care and openness, drawing together people already working at the edges of relationship with land and culture. The subtle attentiveness of Bríd Walsh to the energies of the land and the weather in the lead-up to and throughout the gathering also shaped the conditions that allowed the work to unfold as it did. We all felt that working with the land in this way is a much needed practice and one which weaves us potently back into the song of place. It is something to be continued, in Scotland and other places across these lands.