The Land for Those that Work it
This is a report I wrote for a Lyth Arts touring cinema project I was involved in last year as part of the Climate Beacons program
The goal of the “Land for Those that Work it” touring cinema program was fairly straightforward — To screen a series of films in various locations throughout Caithness and East Sutherland, which focus on climate issues in Scotland and beyond, covering themes like land justice, fishing & forestry, sea lore & coastal ecology and common land practices. We hoped to give reasons and opportunities for folks to gather and engage in conversations around climate related issues that feel relevant and pertinent to Caithness and East Sutherland.
Climate issues are no longer niche issues. Today they seep into just about every aspect of life in some way or another. Whilst Caithness and East Sutherland may be seen as remote or peripheral to the seats of power where many decisions are being made, they are in fact in the beating heart of where some of these most pressing issues are playing out. As Magnus Davidson pointed out in his article for the John O’Groat Journal “Rethinking Remote” in 2022, “if we consider the biggest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century, climate change, we can consider that urban places, which hold a large share of our country’s population, are remote from the resources they need to combat it.”[i]
Whether it’s peatbogs for carbon storage, the abundance of birdlife and biodiversity, or wind and tidal power for the renewable energy transition, the Far North is resource rich. But there are often many different, often competing, dynamics at play.
Most would probably agree there’s an urgent need to restore peatbogs, to implement measures to protect and boost our biodiversity, or to facilitate a transition away from fossil fuel dependence towards renewable energies. But the question of how best to bring about these changes is still very much up for debate. Who are the beneficiaries when these changes are made, and who are the losers? Who is accumulating power and who is being disenfranchised? What power structures are at play and how are they being propped up?
The films that were programmed touched on themes that can be felt acutely in many parts of Scotland and the UK, Caithness and East Sutherland being no exception. Whether it was to discuss issues around over-tourism, just energy transitions, community owned and managed land, local vs incomer dynamics, the rise in short-term letting and lack of housing, or marginalised rural industries, week after week throughout the program, bums would fill seats and folks would engage in passionate and respectful debate and discussions to try to unpick how the themes of each film sat in the place where they were being shown. And as the series started to find its grove, these tensions become more acute with each passing event.
Bower Hall
The Climate Beacons film series kicked off on an icy January day at Bower Hall. The old village hall heaters were cranked up, tartan blankets laid out, and tables were set with giant sheets of paper, post-it notes and felt tip pens to collect ideas and concerns about the proposal to rehome Lyth’s mobile Unexpected Garden to the grounds around the hall. Here it will become a community garden. And throughout the evening not only would we watch films together, but we’d dream together as to what we’d collectively want this space to become.
The hall had been open all afternoon with folks coming in and out to learn more about the garden and offer suggestions, to chat and to generate ideas. Shortly after the dark settled in, the evening meal pulled up curtesy of Thurso based Tex-Mex food truck “Taco East”, which reflected the Latin American flavour of the films to come. To compliment the feast was a range of locally foraged herbal teas and cordials mixed and curated by Amanda from “Natures Path Natural Ways” to help the burritos go down.
The night’s film program consisted of four short films produced by an organisation called “If Not Us Then Who,” who’s remit is to “communicates first-hand the unique personal stories of Indigenous Peoples, as they battle to protect their lives, their cultures and our forests.”
Whilst most of the short films screened depicted indigenous communities in South and Central America, in a subtly provocative way, which went on to frame the whole programme for the weeks ahead, the series kicked off with a short called “Dùthchas: Community Forests in Scotland.”
The word Dùthchas has, in recent years, started to be commonly used when discussing issues around land and how to relate to it across the whole of Scotland. It’s a word that is hard to give a neat translation in English, but which essentially means a feeling of belonging and interconnectedness to your homeland (your dùthaich). But it also means your sense of responsibility to look after and protect this homeland, and with that it is your right to be there and to belong to it. It’s been described as a “tangible conduct and action motivated by a sense of ethics, respect, and responsibility for said place and community to maintain ecological balance.”[ii]
Throughout the Highland Clearances, those being cleared felt their hereditary right of dúthchas was being violated. Beginning in Strathnaver in Sutherland, at the Rosal clearance village, the film gives a brief recap on this traumatic period. Places that may today be empty and seen as wilderness were once filled with people. It then begins to explore some of the more hopeful ways of relating to land that have been emerging in the last couple decades, particularly community owned land and woodland crofts. These type of community focused, multi-generational ways of engaging with land are exciting and and show that that some of this sense of dùthchas, which has been dramatically weakened, can be revived. After explaining how he sees Kilfinan Community Forest as his forest and a place for his children and grandchildren, volunteer Willie MacAllan, says that he feels a “responsibility with it in a formal sense. I feel it’s somewhere I want to invest time and effort.”
It’s sentiments such as Willie’s that the Bower Community Garden will need to attempt to cultivate for it to be a success. Gathering to dream about what this space could become, is one of the first steps in the process. The paper on the tables began to fill up with ideas and suggestions of how the garden could be used and what could be in it. Some were outlandish, some more modest; some whimsical, others more logistical; some excitable, others sceptical. It was all captured and recorded.
The next three films were set amongst indigenous communities in Brazil, Honduras, and Peru. They all depicted struggles to defend territories which communities rely upon and belong to, from powerful external forces. Some elements of these films and stories were hopeful, some of them harrowing.
One film focused on a community who had been threatened with eviction from the river they had always lived by, as they did not have title deeds to the land. But as this hopeful narrative showed, by creating detailed maps of their river and the wider territory, and by then documenting how the community used them, they were able to retain customary title and tenure of the territory. By re-mapping they were able to link cultural memory with action.
Another film focused on a dynamic where landless farmers were settling onto Indigenous territory. It begged the question why the settlers were landless in the first place? What had caused this? Was it the case that when their own territories had previously been broken up and the people of the territory were now dispossessed, and forced to settle elsewhere?
There was a sense throughout the three films that the peoples depicted in them knew how to live-in balance with their territories, but that this balance is under constant threat. “If we lose our identity, we lose our culture, and we lose everything,” someone says.
Watching these films which depict indigenous communities struggling to protect their territories and homelands, alongside a film about both loss and revival in the Highlands may seem tangential or unrelated but doing it this way set out a lot of interesting questions. Questions which spilt over into many of the following film screenings and discussions:
When large projects are proposed which will take place in the county and surrounding areas, what funding and investment are the communities seeing or likely to see with these changes? Are the people who live here given an adequate say in how these changes come about and are their voices listened to or given significant weight? What does violence look like and what constitutes as violence?
And what can we learn from our ancestors to help us understand the places we call home today? It was this point that Amanda from Natures Path Natural Ways closed the night off with. She spoke of how activities such as foraging can enable us to reconnect with and recover some of knowledge, resourcefulness, and wisdom of about our own territories that our ancestors once would have had.
Reay Hall
Next it was an evening of Scottish classics at Reay Hall. Following an afternoon screening of the children’s animated eco-fable “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest”, folks began flocking in to enjoy a hot toddy and a Burns night haggis, neeps, and tatties curtesy of Thurso Community Kitchen, and to watch Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero.”
There can be few films more fitting for this particular venue. With a premise of a small community trying to navigate how to handle the proposal of a giant energy project arriving in the village, connecting some of the dynamics at play in the fictional village of “Ferness” with Caithness wasn’t difficult. Whether it’s the giant on and offshore wind turbines that are beginning to dominate the landscape and seascapes of the County or the legacy of the neighbouring Dounreay nuclear facility, energy and energy projects are ever present in the landscape and the psyche here.
Once the end credits began to windup, we introduced the evening’s guest speaker to facilitate the discussions — Caithness’ own local hero Magnus Davidson. Magnus, who is currently the socio-economics manager at Dounreay, was able to ground and connect different elements of the film to many of the things going on in Caithness and Sutherland, before opening the discussion up to the floor.
The nuclear facilities, while controversial, had provided thousands of good, stable jobs for decades, and had, according to many voices in the room, brought a great many benefits and investments to the local area. This appears to be in contrast with the benefits or lack thereof that communities are seeing from the many wind energy projects which are becoming more and more prevalent. Whist most are likely to agree that renewable energy is in principle a good thing, there was a feeling that the ways in which these projects are being implemented is leaving communities surrounding these projects with little tangible benefits.
Rather than the Community land buyouts that are becoming more normalised across the Highlands and Scotland, Local Hero centres around an attempted community land sell-out, which raised interesting questions about community governance and whether communities necessarily make the right decisions for their places? However, the film ends with the proposed sell-out not able to happen because of the whims of two powerful people. One a billionaire, the other a landowner. Despite all the hopes and dreams, the community end up exactly where they began, and with very little say or agency in the events that took place.
Magnus, a former Research Associate at UHI’s Environmental Research Institute in Thurso, laughed that with all the promises that the community were given, all they ended up getting was an environmental research institute.
Whilst not being depicted as a lead character in the film, the impacts and repercussions of the whims and desires of billionaire Felix Happer are all over it. Magnus drew out ideas about how often powerful individuals, similar to Happer, are in positions to make impactful decisions, which have huge consequences for communities and the land, often based around their own personal passion projects. In the case of the film, the billionaire’s passion project is the night sky and the stars (A nice connection to the planned spaceport just along the road in Sutherland). But this type of thing can be seen in many areas of the North, historically and in the present. Where powerfully rich people’s special interest project, whether it’s historic clearances for sheep, or some of the approaches to rewilding and “green lairdism” we are seeing today, have enormous impacts on territories and the people within them. The dynamic can still too often be one when individuals, such as Happer, can call the shots on what happens to both landscapes and to the communities living within them.
Brora
Given quite how close to the bone the next film felt, the fact that it was set in Cornwall, a region about as geographically distant as you could get from Brora and still be in mainland Britain, was very useful. “Bait”, a low budget drama with a striking visual style, is described by film Critic Mark Kermode as a “genuine modern masterpiece.” Dealing with many interconnected issues such as the rise of short-term letting, the decline in traditional economies such as small boat fishing, rural gentrification and local vs incomer dynamics, the lack of prospects for young people in rural setting, and of course over-tourism, there was plenty of topics for the participants to get their teeth stuck into.
Despite the immediate technical challenge of not being able to fit a screen into the space, the intimacy of Brora’s Fisherman’s Hall was a perfect for the screening. Projecting the film onto a bedsheet pinned to the wall only enhanced the homespun charm of the night as folks squeezed in to fill up their bowls with piping hot Cullen Skink and fresh bread.
Hosting the discussion on this occasion was Julian Grant, who we managed to tempt away from the final throws of writing up his PHD thesis. Over the last few years Julian’s been studying the intersections between local communities and tourism around the North Coast 500 which has given him a unique perspective on how many of the dynamics depicted on the screen were playing out in the North. For many communities along the NC500, many of these dynamics have become more acute in the last few years.
This film isn’t a fable. There are no real goodies and baddies. Nobody is depicted as being entirely right or entirely wrong. Most of the characters are dealing with are relatively complex situations. Yet the forces that are at play appear as hard to hold back as the tide that takes the former fishing boat, now repurposed to run day trips for tourists, in and out of the harbour each day. When a young fisherman dies in the film’s final act, we have a literal and symbolically representation of the end of way of life and the lack of a future for the village. It might appear to imply that the situation depicted is hopeless. But the tragedy leads to a reconciliation between conflicting characters who, in the closing shots, defiantly carry on a way of life that is fast disappearing. This continuing on despite everything is a powerful form of resistance and a powerful ending to a powerful film.
Julian connected many of the ways he saw issues in the film mirrored across NC500 communities, before opening the hall up for discussion. And this was a discussion that just kept going. Once people began to speak and offer thoughts, ideas, concerns, angers, and hopes to start to be voiced in passionate and urgent ways. The film and Julian’s thoughts about it had touched a nerve. It became readily apparent that this type of discussion was a forum that was very much needed. Somewhere where people could meet and voice things that had been pent up and that they’d wanted to say for a long time.
Wick
I couldn’t attend the next event which was held at the Wick Heritage Centre. The event came in the aftermath of Storm Otto. Barn roofs were blown off, caravans had been flipped over and general carnage seemed to be the order of the day. In my case part of a roof of our house that had stood since 1876 didn’t survive the storm. It was a visceral reminder that the issues we were gathering to discuss throughout the series were not abstract but very real.
The night’s film was an experimental short documentary called “Seaweed” made by Julia Parks. The film which uses archival footage, and oral histories, and contemporary footage collaged together in 16mm format, is described as ‘A marine odyssey into the folklore, ecology and history of seaweed in northern Scotland. Voiced by harvesters, environmentalists, archaeologists, and seaweed farmers behind the miracle resource.’
The film was followed by several water-based poems and readings from Caithness Makar George Gunn. Whilst Shore, a Wick based company who harvest and process seaweed into delicious and nutritious foods, began to serve up am exciting selection of their seaweed ramen broths, folks began to reach for pens and paper and foraging for stories, poems and pictures about their different relationships to the sea and to seaweed.
Halkirk
Riverwoods was screened at Halkirk’s Ulbster Arms — the famous fishing hotel situated on the famous fishing river. River Thurso is one Scotland’s finest rivers for salmon fishing and something the folk here are very proud off. It also proved to be an ideal venue for this film.
The film was produced by “Scotland: The Big Picture,” a leading promoter of rewilding in Scotland, and explores very clearly many of the different factors leading to the dramatic decline in Atlantic salmon across the country. Looking at whole river systems, from their upland sources to their mouths by the seas, the film argues that our rivers and the land surrounding them are in a bad way. This, it argues, is principally due to years of mismanagement. Healthy rivers need to be able to wiggle and meander; they need to be protected and shaded by riparian trees; there needs to be plenty of debris and natural damming to both regulate their flow and to create safe habitat for juvenile salmon to hide in. Much of this is missing from our riverscapes across Scotland today.
There was something almost poetic about showing this film in the Ulbster Arms given how much of an impact can be felt, not only across Caithness but across the whole of Scotland, from the influence of a man called Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster. Sinclair who was born in Thurso, was a leading proponent of “agricultural improvement” in the 18th and 19th centuries and sat as the first chairman British Board of Agriculture. In many ways, what we perceive today as the farming landscape is in large part due to the impact of his transformations and recommendations. These transformations included both the straightening of many rivers to bring the land around them into agricultural production, and the recommendations and policies which led to the Highland Clearances.
In the context of this film, the connection between these two things was worth drawing out. The film begins by showing some incredible footage of the rivers of Southern Alaskan where the abundance of Pacific salmon shown is simply mind-blowing. The land and the waterways appeared to be pristine and teaming with life in an almost unfathomable way. What the film however fails to mention is that this far from being an unmanaged wilderness, this landscape is still, in a large part, managed and protected by the indigenous peoples of the territories, principally the Tlingit, the Tsimshian, and the Haida. What we see as pristine and teaming with abundance is the result of indigenous stewardship which has been defended and fought for over generations. The type of right relationship with land and water that is still found amongst these communities, was disrupted, and largely broken here in the Highlands due, in large part, to the changes and impacts of folks like Sir John Sinclair. We still feel the repercussions of this today. The film has quotes like “The future of nature in Scotland is in the hands of all of us” and, in relation to abuse of the land, “we’ve all been guilty of it.” Neither of these statements are true. Scotland has the most concentrated pattern of private landownership anywhere in Europe. Last I looked considerably less that 500 individuals owned half of the land and 16 owned 10%. Decisions about how the land is treated are not in all our hands.
The post screening discussion, this time hosted by myself, was as lively and engaged as ever. There was discussion about the need for an integrated approach to repairing our river systems, where different sectors and different actors can be brought together to come up with a way forward. Questions about whether this narrative applies to Caithness at all, given that it’s been a historically treeless landscape. What was made clear was that there are no one size fits all, cookie cutter solutions to these types of restoration projects. There are also many different opinions as to what the best use of land is, often conflicting. What best use of land might look like to someone looking to increase juvenile salmon numbers might be completely different from someone working to boost ground nesting bird numbers or someone working in commercial forestry, agriculture or indeed managing grouse moors and deer forest. You can see these competing value systems and the tensions that arise from them playing out across the landscapes.
A big question is what actions are we able to take after seeing the film? One woman said that after seeing the film she just wanted to scream because there was so little she, as someone who did not own land, could do. What can we as individual do? What agency do we all have? This is the type of debate that could have gone on all night. As with the issues thrown up at the previous screenings, people want to have forums and opportunities to discuss and debate these types of issues. The debates around them are very much alive and there is a very clear appetite to have spaces where they can be tackled and worked through together.
The Ulbster Arms generously provided food and refreshments for the evening.
Freswick
The Climate Beacons film series ended in flamboyant fashion with a flamboyant film screened in a flamboyant venue and accompanied by flamboyant canapes and cocktails, provided by Ice and Fire Distillery. Folks who gathered for the event got a rare chance to be inside Freswick Castle, a medieval building built upon the foundations of a 12th century Viking settlement, which our host, Murray, has been lovingly restoring over the past 25 years.
The evening’s film was Paul Wright’s Arcadia, an experimental feature-length film compiled together from archival footage from across the length and breadth of rural UK over the past century. The film explores the British people’s changing relationship with land over this time period, both in terms of how it’s used and worked, but also how it’s perceived and valued. Depicting different practices, customs and rituals which were peculiar and unique to different seasons and localities found across the UK, the film, set to a heady, almost psychedelic score, felt at times like watching a fever dream. Starting off as a celebration of the diversity and beauty of the British countryside, the film quickly became something much darker and left some challenging questions lingering. Can we ever truly bring back what has already been lost?
The centrepiece of the film for me was a terrifying clip of a woman who had taxidermized her beloved pet poodle and still treated it as if it were alive. “Once something is gone it is very hard to bring it back” a voiceover from the archives points out.
In many ways this notion formed a perfect bookend to finish the film series, which began amongst the ruins of the Rosal clearance village. This is a poignant reminded that we can never bring the dead back to life. What’s gone is gone and we cannot and must not attempt to treat something that is dead as a living thing. Rather, we can attempt to imbue new life into the ruins of what was once there. This is what Murray has done with Freswick Castle. The building, once a ruin, has been restored for it to be lived in, for it to contain life, and for it to host gatherings and to be filled with voices and laughter. It has not been restored to be just an empty monument to times long since gone by.
Rather than ending the series in a cerebral way with a discussion we chose instead to end in a more bodily and tactile way by clearing the chairs from the floor for an Orcadian style Strip the Willow. Many folks in attendance knew the dance. Some didn’t. But by just getting on with it and working it out together, this energetic and seemingly endless, interlinking, and spiralling dance somehow sorted itself out. And just like that folk whirled down the castle steps, onto the gravel and into the shuttle buses which drove off into the darkness, and the film series came to an end.
Next steps
It’s not clear exactly what element of the “Land for Those that Work it” program made it all work so well. The films themselves? The promise of good discussion? The informal and hospitable atmosphere that the team strove to create? The fact that all the events were free to attend? Or whether it all happened at a time of year when there wasn’t a huge amount else on? It could well have been a combination of all of these things. What was clear, however, was that this formula worked. There is a hungry appetite for events like these. People do want spaces and places to be able to gather together and to have relaxed but focused discussions about topics that matter and seem relevant to them and to their places.
But what is clear to me is that despite the simplicity of our goal of putting on these short events which enablefolks to have spaces to gather and to engage in conversations with one another, in today’s world these spaces are very hard to find and desperately needed. People long to be able to talk to one another and to find community. But spaces for community to be forged and for community to happen are no longer easy to come across. It’s no longer just a given that they even exist.
I think we can overthink all this. I don’t think things needs to be overly complicated. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be complicated. By creating relaxed and informal spaces where a diversity of people can gather, maybe by bringing something, such as a film, to the room to give everyone some commonality and a scaffolding to build conversation around, and then by simply allowing time and space for folks to talk and be with one another, some of these needs can begin to be met.
These are unlikely to be met if they are not addressed in a proactive way. Without us choosing to prioritise the resourcing, fostering, and nurturing of these spaces, they are unlikely to just happen by themselves.
