How Scotland’s old stories shaped my album ‘Binnorie’

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I grew up in Orkney, an archipelago in the north of Scotland which has long been steeped in folklore, music, and creativity. Folk tales played a significant part in my childhood. While I was in primary school, I recall a special felting class where we depicted the story of a young boy named Assipattle who defeated the Mester Stoor Worm, a sea serpent who threatened the land and demanded young maidens to eat.

In recent years, I have come to realise how important stories are to me. My debut record told the story of my Grandmother Margaret and her 1950 journey from Orkney to Canada and back, which she took in order to solve a dilemma of the heart.

I credit a lot of my need for documenting the world around me to her; in photography, and in saving newspaper clippings, concert tickets, birthday cards, and festival passes. Granny was never without a camera at family events, and films were always processed, printed, and into albums with captions, dates, and names right away. I remember as a teenager taking her back home to get her camera when she’d forgotten to take it to a family gathering.

She religiously kept diaries and left those for my aunt in her will. Some years after she passed I was planning a trip to Canada and my aunt mentioned the diaries, and that Granny had spent time there in 1950. As we read, we realised that the 1950 diary stops abruptly as she is on board the ship to Canada, saying she’ll write elsewhere. We never found the missing diary, but it sparked an idea for me.

I spent the next few years gathering stories from her Canadian relatives, who were then in their 90s, and hunting down photographs and postcards from her trip. My album Out Of My Own Light is comprised of music inspired by her journey and I have been telling her story in live shows ever since.

This new record, Binnorie, has come to be in sort of a roundabout way – I have had many people suggest to me that I should put together a Celtic Christmas concert. I ultimately decided that I’d be more excited about exploring a show that looks at Halloween and Harvest traditions from Scotland.

I spent much of 2025 researching, reading, and exploring the old stories that I grew up with, and eventually put together All Hallows’ Eve, the live show where the music from Binnorie originated. I created costumes for myself and my band to dress up as characters from the folk tales we told.

A huge part of my research was spending hours at a time immersed in the Tobar An Dualchais/Kist of Riches online archive. I found old murder ballads and stories of Halloween traditions in Orkney; games that were played to predict the careers of future husbands, tricks played where clothes were stuffed with straw and hung on the washing line of neighbours, young Orkney children up to no good, and running and falling in the mud while trying to evade capture by a grumpy local farmer.

I learnt of the Shetland tradition of Skekling and created my own version of their beautiful hand crafted, woven straw Skekler hats (albeit with the wrong kind of straw and a lot of hot glue, apologies to my Shetland friends.)

What you may know of as ’Trick or Treating’ originated in Scotland and Ireland, and is known as ’guising’. Skekling is Shetland’s version of this. Around All Hallows’ Eve the veil between the living and the dead is much thinner. It is believed that spirits roam the lands, many of whom may not have good intentions.

In order to trick these evil spirits children were disguised as ghouls themselves, to prevent them from being stolen away. Costumes were made from sheep’s wool or even hide, faces were blackened, and sacks worn with holes cut for eyes– the old photographs are more terrifying than anything modern I’ve ever seen! Guisers would knock on doors and be given offerings such as fruit and nuts, as a gesture of luck in warding off the evil.

Villagers would get together around a large fire, taking a torch home to light the fires of their own hearths and help ward off spirits. Lanterns were carved from neeps (turnips), filled with burning coals, and left in windows. Saucers of milk were left on doorsteps to appease the Cat Sìth – a large black cat with a white patch on its chest, sometimes believed to be a shape-shifting witch. If you didn’t leave milk for the cat sìth, your cows would give sour milk for the rest of the year.

After the success of these live All Hallows’ Eve shows in 2025, I decided to head into the studio with my band and record not only the songs and tunes, but the stories of ghosts, weather witches, and evil stepmothers which we had so much fun telling. We wove music into them, and I am grateful to be able to include some of the Orkney and Shetland voices I found in the School of Scottish Studies, which really help to set the scene and tell the stories.

I am a visual artist as well as a musician and with such vivid images in my head when working on these songs and stories, this seemed like a great opportunity to create some art to go along with Binnorie. As well as a stop motion animation, I made my first crankie, which is a traditional form of visual story telling using a scroll cranked between two spools.

I created the crankie box with my neighbour, artist Mike Cox, utilising fiddle scraps my luthier friend Eva Broadway (The Luthier Collective) was going to be throwing on the fire. The crankie art itself was created from linoleum blocks I carved, as well as watercolour paintings. The project has been a labour of love and I am so excited to share it with the world!

Binnorie is released on 30 October 2026 on Adhyâropa Records.