Poetry of People and the Sea

We are delighted to announce the arrival of our new community publication, “Poetry of People and the Sea.” This book will be delivered to over 200 households in Loth and Kildonan in March. We will also be selling copies in our shop when we open for the season. This beautifully curated book features a wonderful selection of poetry composed by local writers who attended writing workshops led by poet Cait O’Neil McCullagh. The poems create maritime mythologies inspired by pasts in Helmsdale, inspiring futures for the world, and are interwoven with selections of archival images from the Timepsan Collection. The book is a fitting tribute to Gary MacMillan from Helmsdale, who was dedicated to his beloved village and community causes, including the Christmas lights, the Food Larder, the community minibus, and the incredible lifeboat displays at the harbour that raised thousands for the Wick RNLI.

If you are local to Helmsdale, Loth and Kildonan, over 65, and haven’t received your copy by the end of March, please get in touch at enquiries@timespan.org.uk and we will arrange delivery.

About the Workshop

Poet and researcher Cáit O’Neill McCullagh led a a series of four poetry writing workshops and one performance workshop every wednesday from March 19th until April 9th 2025

• Experience a range of inspiring writing exercises, stimulated by a selection of Timespan’s maritime collections: from the Northern Highlands and Islands, and brought from the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean 
• Explore examples of ecopoetry, and traditional lore and legends 
• Write your own new mythologies of people and the sea 
• Practice aspects of poetry writing; develop your own ways of using rhyme and rhythm, and poetic forms based on writing from close to home and around the world.
• Unlock your ideas, and imagine more possible, just, and sustainable futures for living on local coasts, and for life throughout the earth.

All participants will be invited to share writing created in these workshops at a finale ceilidh and in an end of project publication.

Why are we creating new maritime mythologies?

For millennia, long before the coming of the railways and our more recent dependence on roads, the movement of people; animals; plants; the exchange of items, ideas, and cultures, and the increase of trade in capital and influence of powers was carried across the oceans. 

The hastened disappearance of this maritime activity from our day-to-day lives, including the dominance of the car and the offshoring of industrial and commercial aspects of modern life is reinforcing a disconnection from the ebb that surrounds us. We are losing our understanding of the knowledge this ancient and historical relationship can offer including helping us to explore the impact this has had on our climate and ecologies, and our social, economic, and political present. Often, such information would have been included in traditional myths and lore, imaginings of how those who came before lived with, by, and from the sea, 

Can we recall or renovate the stories that are attached like flotsam to the objects and images of past maritime lives? What present-day traditions survive, or have been renewed. What new stories and mythologies might they give rise to, inspiring our future relationship with the sea that connects us to all life across this planet?

About Cáit

Cáit writes at home in Easter Ross. Her debut pamphlet ‘The songs I sing are sisters’ was the winner of the Dreich Classic Chapbook (2022), and was a Saboteur Award Winner in 2023. Her first full-length collection ‘The Bone Folder’ was published by Drunk Muse Press in 2024. She has been commended as ‘a bold and visionary writer who crafts the heartwood of language into luminous work that sings with life’. Nominated for a Pushcart International Poetry Prize in 2025, she is currently working on her second collection.

An archaeologist and ethnologist of the Highlands and Islands, Cáit’s most recent research project ‘New Connections Across the Northern Isles’, exploring how people in Orkney and Shetland are interpreting and using ancient, historical and present-day maritime cultural expressions to develop for their futures and involved co-curating a new virtual museum, including seven commended short films.