Research into 18thCentury Dutch and Scottish anatomists as background to The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes; Wellcome Trust History of Medicine grant for visits to museums and libraries.
Author Archives: wbtnu839mb18
Talks and workshops throughout Cumbria (more than 50 in two years, to WIs, Young Farmers, Quilters Guild, Soroptomists, U3A, playwrights, Humanists, and more!), looking at modern science (Human Genome Project, ‘Dolly (the cloned sheep): the Calendar Girls’ guide to the secret of eternal life’,‘Garry the green fluorescent mouse’, ‘Making eyes’ etc). A Wellcome Trust People […]
NESTA Learning Award, 2005, with Peter Normington (IT, Ardus), to set up a database and website of ‘writer-friendly scientists’ willing to meet and discuss their work with writers. Project included publicity articles, and organising the 2 ‘Subtle Science’ writing competitions sponsored by the Guardian and Science. Plus talks and workshops on ‘putting the science into […]
The Solway Junction Railway that was built across the raised peatbog of Bowness Common in the 19thC – the plan, the digging, a mystery about the navvies; damage to the bog, the eventual removal of the railway, and the conservation work re-wetting the peatlands; the construction and demolition of the Solway Viaduct. With photographer James […]
A lockdown project 2021-22 During and between the various degrees of lockdown, I kept busy by visiting limestone pavements, fossil beds, drystone walls, kilns (including the huge TATA kilns at Shap), quicklime makers, haematite mines, and more. All the articles, and an introduction to the project, are on my Solwayshorewalker blog here.
During 2012 I had the enormous pleasure of visiting and meeting some of the participants from the Lothian Birth Cohort studies – older people in their 70s and 90s. I listened to them, and wrote their ‘life-stories’, as part of the ongoing studies on ageing and cognition in which they are participating. This Lifetimes project was […]
The Fresh and the Salt is a story of the Solway Firth and its origins and ever-changing margins. It’s a story that has influenced other stories, of the lives of non-humans – animals and plants and micro-organisms – and humans, that occupy the edges. The perspective ranges from satellite views to the microscopic, even the […]
Synopsis Catherine Maitland was born in Madras to an Anglo-Indian mother and a British father but, unlike her pale-skinned mother, Catherine is brown. Sent ‘home’ to boarding-school, she endured loneliness, and then the trauma of her mother’s death. Later, when mining engineer Hugh Oates is attracted by her ‘difference’ she is happy to marry him […]
ISBN 0-7472-5296-3 Headline Review Published 1996 Available from Amazon In her cottage on a remote Scottish island, Harriet Falmer has almost forgotten that solitude is not the normal human state. Conscious of the burden of guilt that drove her here, she lives from day to day, working in her garden, fishing, exploring the hills – […]
ISBN 0-7472-5297-1 Headline Review Published 1996 Available from Amazon or from the author (contact me) Julian Kersland, a talented but crippled violinist and leader of a baroque ensemble in Glasgow, is the focus of the needs and theories of a diverse range of people. Early on, his school chaplain convinced him that the accident to […]
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