CAIRNGORMS MAP OF FOLKLORE

People, by nature, share stories. These stories are weathered by time and tongue, and slip into myth, legend, folklore, and warning. Scotland is a land of stories. The identity of Scots has always been rooted and shaped by the landscape—its hills and rivers, glens, mountains, forests, and peatland. Looking for Giants is a project inspired by the exploration of old maps from around Tomintoul, a small village in the north of the Cairngorms National Park, said to be the highest village in the Highlands. This is the ancestral landscape of my grandmother on my mother’s side. Here, the land is steeped in history from whisky smuggling, the Jacobite Rising and the scars it left behind, and from Scalan, the secret catholic seminary hidden in the hills to the east of the village. While leafing through old maps of the area, I came across a small marker near the village indicating a giant’s grave. Curious, I consulted old OS name books and found one from 1867-68. It records the giant’s grave as, ‘a large flat stone sunk in the ground, traditionally said to mark the grave of an ancient hero or giant. The old people have still a superstitious feeling about it and are afraid to destroy it’.

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Looking at the wider landscape around Tomintoul and the Cairngorms National Park, I discovered that the whole area is rich with folklore. This made me ask, if identity is rooted in landscape, and that landscape is full of stories of mythical, magical beings, can both landscape and folklore shape people? In other words, can we explore the cultural history of an area by examining its folklore? This was the main focus for exploration for my Masters thesis and project. Looking for Giants, then, is a folklore map exploring the landscape and legends from the Cairngorms National Park. It is designed to connect the viewer to the landscape through stories of its past, helping add to the cultural history of the area.

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The work in the project includes an interactive and physical map of folklore, with illustrations, natural materials and rivers. A book of folklore which goes into the detail of each story on the map (the video flip-through is located and the bottom of this page), and three short films that can be found in the interactive map.