Seekers of the Lost Ark/Arc
The Boat in the Writing Room: retracing the origins of Stonypath, Little Sparta
Written and presented by Alistair Peebles | Directed by Michael Lloyd
flytingfilms and Brae Editions, 2025 (57' 12")
Screened 28 October 2025 at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
A review by Brandon Logan
LITTLE SPARTA, the landscape garden at Stonypath in the Pentland Hills, is widely regarded as the master-work of the Scottish artist, poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). Removed from Edinburgh by some 25 miles, this complete synthesis of his artistic vision is as equally composed of soil, water and plant matter, as it is of the numerous stone, ceramic and wooden “concrete poems” which fill it. Such is the integrity of the place as a sort of gesamtkunstwerk that one might forget to wonder about its genesis. Did the idea of its making simply spring up unheralded upon Finlay’s arrival at Stonypath, or had the possibility of such a fusion of poetry and physical context already been brewing elsewhere?
In October 2025 I was among an audience gathered at The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, for the premiere screening of The Boat in the Writing Room, a new film written and presented by Alistair Peebles, directed by Michael Lloyd, which poses, and begins to answer, these questions. A longtime scholar of Finlay’s work, Peebles is well placed in his role, and without much delay the film sees him focus his investigations on a ruinous farmhouse at Gledfield, Sutherland, where Finlay lived with his partner, Sue, between the summers of 1965-66. Over the course of the next fifty minutes light is shed on a kind of proto-Little Sparta; the place where Finlay cut his teeth lifting poetry off the page and siting it instead as sculpture in dialogue with its surroundings, while also engaging for the first time in the practical act of gardening, building ponds and moulding the topography of the place.
Joined by Stephen Bann, an art historian and close friend of Finlay’s, the pair pick over the long abandoned site for any signs which might point to the poet’s activity here. It takes brave imagination; the traces of his presence are barely detectable. Largely unseen archival photographs are deployed to help in the imaginative reconstruction, and they lead us to rough marks left on a crumbling section of the house’s wall where Finlay first installed his concrete poem acrobats, the dancing net of letters which spell out the word in diagonals; now a spaced out and shadowy chequerboard, all letters removed. It is no accident that these traces are hard to find, Finlay removed the work and all others that he’d made at Gledfield after a fall-out with the landlord led to the Finlays leaving the place, moving to Stonypath not long after. But, as Peebles helps us to envisage, other works were made here, and interspersed through the film are interviews with friends and collaborators who give shape to Finlay’s actions and influences.
Printer Michael Hamish Glen and landscape architect Peter Lyle were two of Finlay’s earliest collaborators, instrumental in the homages he created to individuals and movements throughout European modernism and the avant-garde. Constructivist tendencies show themselves touchingly in a fixation with building wooden toys—Finlay’s way into concrete.. evocative “simplified forms [which] brimmed with feeling.” Happy Apple, made with Dick Sheeler, is dedicated to the Spanish painter Juan Gris, and horizons of holland reaches great yellow windmill arms out, rhyming with the hills beyond.
Colour clearly mattered at this time, something which at Little Sparta, though enhanced in many areas with sympathetic plantings, gives way to a pervading green. At Gledfield, ark/arc was a vibrant translation of a leaflet-poem into kinetic sculpture, suspended on the balustrade of a flight of steps. Composed of panels painted in primary red, yellow and blue, they reflect their colour onto adjacent white panels, contained at either end by the titular ‘ark’ and ‘arc,’ a playful convergence of subjective perception and the impersonal word. Though the Finlays’ time here was short, it was productive, Bann being inspired to characterise the year’s residence as “an overture” to the great opera to come.
Unsurprisingly, some of the most lucid and revealing insights of the film come from his former partner and collaborator, Sue Swan. Alongside a desire to work in exterior contexts, it seems that the move to Gledfield was prompted in part by Finlay’s agoraphobia, exacerbated by life in Edinburgh and soothed in the countryside. The move worked, and their time at Gledfield was a fundamentally happy one, their son Alec was born there in the Spring of 1966, and Swan points out that the works that were made there were overwhelmingly light-hearted – “cheerful, happy, lovely… thinking back, the impression of Gledfield is a carefree one.” Jumping acrobats, happy apples and toy boats, quite different from the cloistered works, all neo-classical allusion, which grow moss covered under the trees and bridges of Little Sparta. Nonetheless, at Gledfield, Finlay found a place that would act as a later template for world-building.
All is gone now, the closing images of the film show the farmhouse in the process of being stripped back and restored, the earth around it bare clay, a car park to be, part of the holiday development that will comprise the next transformation of the site and its surroundings. Satie plays, a then-favourite of Finlay’s, a melancholy and questioning sound, but it isn’t a sad image. Peebles, Lloyd and their collaborators came just in time and saved this happy episode in the life and work of a man who was known to be difficult and quick to feud. At the start of the film this ruinous site seemed quite a hopeless spot to investigate, but by the end it seems very hopeful indeed.