Witness Notes 2
The Alps, Isère, France. January 2020
(After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content here. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)
Introduction
The word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years.
Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.
Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’1 nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?
More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral.
Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.
When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.
As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order.
I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.
Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.
The Alps, Isère, France. January 2020
The silence of snow is thick and cushioned, the light diffused, reflected, refracted, contradictory. Twigs, branches and trunks are blanketed on one side only, crystal-white creating contrast, highlighting their twisting shapes, calling out their identity to those who know their coded winter pattern.
The sky is gunmetal and thick, brown at the edges, rusting clouds silently slipping lower throughout the day, with occasional tickles of flakes tessellating where they fall.
Here and there are the traces of those who have already passed, footsteps telling tales we trackers delight in—this the nursery of tracking, as with wet sand, the details are beautiful, each trail a story clearly written. We can take these and learn, understand where to look in spring or summer, how the animal moves to avoid a fallen tree, or to step over—or on—a branch. Whispers of a past, with another living thing at their end.
The mountains are a place I adore. Here, in the Alps, the seasons are constantly changing, each major quarter of the year broken down into smaller bites. Winter woodland snows are a delight, something magical, always carrying a hint of Narnia.
If a lamppost had appeared along the trail I followed, I would not have been surprised.
Finally
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If you enjoyed this letter and wish to share it with others, please do so! I love it when someone shares my work.
I also love it when you comment on a piece—really, really love it. During 2025, I have not been as good at responding to comments as quickly as I would like but, seeing as my word of the year for 2026 is almost certainly going to be ‘communication’, I like to think that will soon change.
Finally, many thanks for reading. I truly appreciate each and every one of you who does.
And ‘home’ is another of those words. A subject I have been writing around for decades now, one I keep threatening to try and pin down in a long essay, but an essay which has now escaped the confines of a compact base and rambled out into something wilder, more feral. One day I’ll share that with you.
The detail about trackng in snow being like a nursery really captures something essential. Fresh snow offers that rare clarity where every step tells a complete story, unlike the fragmented traces we usually work with. Been tracking in mountain environments for a while now and that immediate legibility never stops being satisfying, even when its just mapping routine movement patterns. The way seasonal change compresses in alpine regions makes every visit feel like stepping into diferent chapter of the same book.