Stories are wonderful.  They are everywhere.  Sometimes they are a well-known narrative, sometimes they afford a new insight into a well-trodden path, sometimes they tell us something new and revealing, sometimes they remain hidden and yet to be discovered and told: all these infinitely obscure lives that remain to be recorded.   

Stories come from people, places, landscapes, objects, and from a multitude of other sources.  At their best, stories create a relationship between teller, audience, subject, time and place. Barthes et al. (1969) noted that there never existed anywhere a people without stories and they allow the recipients “to glean different emotional, socio-cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and physical connections with a tale” Hearne (2011). Stories are singular and varied in terms of their context, typology, purpose, content, simplicity or complexity (Denning, 2006; Brown et al., 2005; Snowden, 2005).  And just as there never existed a people without stories, neither did there exist a place without stories. A sense of place is essential to human life (Bassano et al. 2019).  A deep love of place is often at the heart of good storytelling and story-based projects. 

Driving through the barren, rugged but achingly beautiful landscape of the Cabrach, a remote upland glen in North-East Scotland, the landscape, the abandoned croft houses, the moorland, the looming presence of the Buck mountain, all combine to shout to the visitor that there are stories here, good, rich, deep, meaningful stories of infinitely obscure lives yet to be recorded.   

For the research team from Robert Gordon University, the Spirit of the Cabrach project was about creating a roadmap through the Cabrach; not a geographical one from Dufftown to Rhynie, but a metaphorical one which would take those elements (people, place, landscape, objects) and create a framework whereby stories could be collected, curated, and retold.  The project title was pun, it was about the Spirit (as in the essence) of the Cabrach, but it was also about malt whisky as the Cabrach glen is one of the most important, and most authentic progenitors of that industry which so shapes and defines Scotland.

There were certain challenges in conceptualising ‘how to tell the story of the Cabrach’.  One was that it could seem – to that casual driver motoring across the glen – that this was an empty or abandoned landscape, a blank canvas in storytelling terms.  Yet the opposite was true, there was a deep, rich, but hidden series of narratives to be told.  There was, perhaps, too much.  Our challenge as the researchers was to chart a middle ground between the casual visitor’s perception of an empty landscape and that of the local experts who knew and loved the place and had stories about every bothy, croft, dyke and tree, and to get to a position were stories could tell ‘just enough’ about the glen, the community, its people, and artefacts. 

Through extensive and lengthy conversational interview with local experts, subjects emerged which could be group into broader themes that would enable a compelling narrative framework for the Cabrach as a whole.  This evolved into a conceptual model of heritage storytelling which identified a central core narrative (the ‘key feature’ or the unique selling point) which in the case of the Cabrach was its role as one of the key progenitors of malt whisky distilling.  Around the edges but strongly bisecting this central narrative, were the landscape and the people.  Also bisecting it was the need for stories to engage, to create a visceral or affective connected, a sense of verstehen or empathetic understanding in the hearts and minds of those receiving the stories, the audience.   

The learning from the conceptual model created for the Cabrach led to us being able to generalise the framework for wider contexts, by replacing the Cabrach-specific features with more generic ones ‘People’, ‘Place’, and ‘Perception’ all circling a central ‘Core Narrative’ or main story. The model for the Cabrach created a framework whereby not everything has necessarily vanished, and whereby those infinitely obscured lives and places and stories can yet be told.

Image credit: Cabrach by Peter Reid.