HIGHLAND LIFE: ANCIENT AND MODERN (Part One)

HIGHLAND LIFE: ANCIENT AND MODERN – TWO NIGHTS TO REMEMBER.

FIRST NIGHT: Saturday 7^th June           SECOND NIGHT: Thursday 12^th June

THE HIGHLAND TRAVELLERS IN C20TH SCOTLAND: an Evening of Film, Poetry and Remembrance – with TIMOTHY NEAT (filmmaker, artist and writer) and his Lifelong friend MARGARET BENNETT (folklorist, singer and writer):

THE SUMMER WALKERS (1976) (53 minutes)

RATHAD NAN CEARD (1994) (30 minutes)

GAIA IN EXTREMIS (2025)

The Summer Walkers is a 16mm film made fifty years ago. It documents the traditional lifestyle of the Travelling People and Pearl Fishers in the Highlands (from Perthshire North). It was the first of many collaborative projects developed with the great Scots poet HAMISH HENDERSON.

The Summer Walkers was the name the crofters of the far north-west gave to the indigenous Travelling People – the itinerant tinsmiths, horse-dealers, hawkers and pearl fishers - who each May went out ‘on the road’. Not gypsies, the Highland Travellers were Gaelic-speaking Scots and heirs to a still vital and ancient culture. The Summer Walkers documents an archetypal and now vanished way of life.

Tim and Margaret will then discuss the film and answer questions – before launching GAIA IN EXTREMIS, Tim’s twelfth major book: – a highly original and very important exploration of the contemporary World Crisis (ecological and political). It contains over 200 coloured drawings, and 200 poems by Neat plus articles by John Berger, Denis Brotto and George Gunn of Caithness.

MARGARET BENNETT will then introduce RATHAD nan CEARD (The Traveller Roads), a documentary film made by Timothy Neat for Television in 1994 as a follow-up to THE SUMMER WALKERS (in Gaelic– with subtitles). The film retraces the journey Hamish Henderson made with renowned Gaelic comedian, writer and piper Norman Maclean - to meet Essie Stewart (and the Stewarts of Remarstaig, in Sutherland - in 1957).

This rare showing of this vivid portrayal of Highland Life will be followed by a short discuss discussion of the Grand Life of Hamish Henderson (Champion of the Travelling People – and a true Hero of Scotland), before Margaret Bennett concludes the evening by introducing video footage filmed at Strathearn Arts, in 2014 documenting the last public appearance of the great Perthshire Traveller singer Sheila Stewart – at Tim Neat’s last Crieff show!

TIMOTHY NEAT - writer, film maker, photographer, teacher and artist - was raised in North Cornwall (mother’s ancestry Scottish). His first job was at Lendrick Muir School, Rumbling Bridge, Perthshire, where he taught at a boarding school for Maladjusted Children of High Intelligence. (Playing cricket for Dollar he often enjoyed himself in Comrie!) From 1973/88 he was art historian at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, and from 1988 until 2018 worked as an independent film-maker, writer, beekeeper and wild mushroom hunter from his home in Wormit, Fife. Approaching old age - buffeted by the winds of fortune - he returned to Cornwall to immerse himself in poetry and art. His children and grandchildren live in St Andrews, in Galloway, and Malmo, Sweden.

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