Hay Lodge Park, Peebles. Wild Writers Festival, Eastgate January 2026. It was sleeting but I’d paid for my guided wild swim at the Dookits, so I was determined to do it! Ingrid was so reassuring and the whole experience was magical – especially when two deer jumped in just nearby and swam across the river. […]

I first started creative writing about a year before COVID, enticed by a free Gateshead Council project called Art Diamonds that ran sessions in libraries throughout the borough for those over the age of 50. During COVID our tutor used to send us prompts and we met on Zoom. That particular day, I think I […]

Jessica was tired. She’d been attacked from all sides, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. All she wanted to do was get back to a sense of normality. She dressed in warm clothes and wearily went down stairs. The sun was beginning to rise. She turned, her small dog looked at her, his head […]

I have spent most of my life by the River Tweed. Explored much of it, sailed on it, swum in it, canoed it and nearly drowned in it as a child. Though I have never fished. I have spent much time looking at the river from a casual glance to prolonged study. It demands your […]

At the meeting of the waters, you’ll still hear folks reminiscing about the time when different bridges crossed the river here. And how the hostelry on its bank had gone through many lives. As a local’s pub, basically a licensed room in somebody’s house, then extended to become a fancy gastro pub. Then private house […]

We crossed the pass in looping bends and followed the road as it twisted down through broad-shouldered, sheep-grazed hills into Tweeddale. Tweed’s Well, the source of the Tweed, was simply marked by a road sign pointing seemingly nowhere but honouring a drip-fed spring pushing its pile of coins to the surface, and not much more […]