About this site

Sourin Brae is an independent publication launched in April 2025 by Alistair Peebles, a writer and researcher who lives in Orkney, Scotland. As discussed in the site's first post, After Catameringue, Sourin Brae is a dedicated occasional space for stories and other materials deriving from the decade and a half that the author has spent researching the life and work of the internationally renowned Scottish poet, artist and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). The research is slowly turning into a book.

A project coming to fruition at an earlier stage is an educational documentary film which Brae Editions has co-produced over the last four years with flytingfilms.com. The Boat in the Writing Room: retracing the origins of Stonypath, Little Sparta tells the story of an almost forgotten but crucially transformative phase in Finlay's early career.

Able to live again in the countryside, in the year that Finlay and his family spent at Gledfield Farmhouse in Sutherland, 1965-66, he at last had the space to bring his work into three-dimensional form. He began collaborative production, central to his later practice, and moved definitively into classicism. At Gledfield too, with his partner Sue Finlay (now Swan), Finlay first began gardening.

"I have become interested also in concrete poetry in relation to architecture & avant-gardening … from the poem as an object on the page to the poem as an object properly realised in sandblasted glass, stone or indeed concrete. … I also continue publishing, believing in the lyrical, in intelligence, not in ‘thought’. I believe also that there is no need for Scotland to be different from other nations. We should have a contemporary literature like everywhere else." – Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1965/66

The Boat in the Writing Room is an independent, not-for-profit production. Any proceeds from screening the film will be donated to the Little Sparta Trust. Meanwhile, publicity for the film is currently being prepared and venues secured. We are grateful for all support received in the making of the film, mentioning in particular the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Gledfield Highland Estate for access to the site.

More to follow, but meanwhile, back to the "about"...

After Catameringue gives a brief explanation of the site's title, which has only coincidentally to do with lemons – the quote comes from a poem of Finlay's, "The English Colonel Explains an Orkney Boat" – but the link will help with pronunciation.

Sourin is the easternmost district of Rousay, a "heart-shaped" island in the Orkney archipelago, one of a small group known as the Inner North Isles, where Finlay lived for a few months in the spring of 1959. He supported himself by labouring on the island's circular road, and had a small house by the shore. This he celebrated in a couple of other lyric poems, which like "The English Colonel..." were published the following year in The Dancers Inherit the Party, a collection that first began to make his name internationally. Partly for that reason he always cherished his connection with the place, which remained for him an important imaginative source: "Orkney, 'or as Finlay puts it, Arcady'" (Yves Abrioux).

On the northern border of the district, at the Blossan, a high point adjacent to the road, lies an installation of Finlay's, of 2005, Gods of the Earth/ Gods of the Sea. Sourin Brae thus connects the shore and the Blossan, the past and the future, the Virgilian, not to say the Heraclitean, with the homely, but "brae" has a further resonance in this context.

In Stromness, 2007-8, in one of the town's numerous former shop premises, Peebles established an exhibition venue which ran for two summers under the title of Porteous Brae Gallery. This project then transformed into an occasional small imprint, Brae Editions. Its most recent production was The Gledfield Effect (2020), but a multiple, Rousay Mending, is in development.

At present, Sourin Brae is likewise in a development stage, no less than its author's understanding of the platform. The question of paid subscriptions will be addressed further down the line.