Walking the Dalriada trail with Maisie

Those of you who pay attention to my music (thankyou!) may have seen my new videos, that came out on Upset The Rythm. Both of these videos feature footage from A trip last spring, with Maisie, Toad, Dominique Rivard and wonderful film maker Lizzie MacKenzie (see more of her work here). The full film will be released in the summer, after the album comes out.

They feature snippets from our journey along the Dalriada Heritage Trail. ​The Dalriada Heritage Trail was created in 2010. It weaves together ancient landscapes and stories, linking Carnasserie Castle through Kilmartin Glen and the Moine Mhor National Nature Reserve to Dunadd Fort. From there it winds through ancient Atlantic oak woodlands to the Crinan Canal and the Achnabreac cup and ring marked rocks. It’s a route dense with memory and meaning. 

Travelling with a horse is never straightforward. It’s a collaboration built on care, trust, and a lot of problem-solving. The trail is not particularly multi access, so the videos give a sense of some of the problem solving highlights!  

Maisie going to sea to wash her iodiney knees after she scuffed them on a previous walk.

Horses in the Landscape

Horses have shaped Scotland’s landscape, heritage and history. Our Eriskay ponies, small and hardy, can be traced back through written sources, stone carvings and other ancient depictions to the Bronze Age. Before that, their ancestors roamed the forests and hills of Scotland.

For thousands of years, horses were the engines of the land — powering agriculture, mining, transport, and warfare. Long before roads were paved, paths were walked and ridden, creating dense networks across the hills. But many of these ancient routes are now impassable: blocked by locked gates, cattle grids, deer fences. Roads that were once built for horse hooves now carry fast cars and lorries.

Planning a long-distance route with a horse therefore takes time and care. It’s a mix of local knowledge and map-gazing. Small wooden bridges might collapse under Maisie’s weight. Cows in a field might charge. A bog will swallow half a tonne of animal. Even a boardwalk — seemingly helpful — can be slick and unsafe for hooves. And other horses? Even they add complications.

Col My Love

One moment of the trip stands out clearly in my memory — captured in the video for Col My Love, a song I recently released. In the footage, Maisie and I approach a bridge that we can’t cross. It’s a simple moment, but it captures something important about the trail: how plans are not always possible, how you have to listen, assess, adapt and then take of your trousers. (Some of you may wonder why I didn't ride Maisie across. The answer is, she is really not confident with water so I would have had to put a lot of 'pressure' on her to get her across (ie. boot her) which is just not how I like to interact with my horses, so I lead by example instead!)

The song itself is based loosely on the piobaireachd Colla Mo Rùn. I translated some Gaelic lyrics into Scots, weaving in an ending section of canntaireachd — pipe melody sung using vocables — inspired by archival recordings of Mary Morrison. What I love about this song is how it feels in my body when I sing it. It’s powerful. Singing with Harry and his pipes, there’s a togetherness that’s incredibly satisfying — the voice and the pipes moving as one.

The original Gaelic words are a kind of warning — a call to be cautious if you come too close to the shore. That tension felt like a good fit for the footage of Maisie and I trying to cross the bridge. Not quite the edge-of-a-cliff kind of danger, but a wee moment of risk management!

Walking the Dalriada Trail with a horse is a kind of living archaeology. It’s a way of remembering with your body — through movement, through strain, through song. It asks a different kind of attention.

A well earned pint - nearly home!