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 poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). The research is slowly turning into a book.

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 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. Meanwhile...

Up the Brae!