FATHOMS AND METRES

Voyages through maritime stories.

You can trace the routes of the enduring stories of North and West Scotland by following the sea-routes that connect them. You can find echoes of the same core story in areas hundreds of miles apart but along a navigable route. You can trace recurring themes – premonitions, lovers who can never meet, links across generations, a pattern of three the need of eloquence to save you from hostile conditions.

They are not all sad in tone, there is trickery and wit and the sheer exhilaration that comes from driving seaworthy boats towards the limits of their capabilities.

Since his Creative Scotland Award in 2002, Ian Stephen has sailed the routes
suggested by many of these stories, in different vessels. He has been sharing them as live performances, or in web-logs, or workshops. They have been told in settings ranging from the island of Ouessant off the Brittany coast to the city of Olomouc at the heart of the Czech Republic.

He has now begun to transcribe the telling of them to a written form but one which will  keep the spoken voice in it. The book will alternate the telling of the stories with a brief log of the voyages which allowed him to experience the geography that is a central to them.

The author has been publishing poetry and short stories internationally since 1979. But he has also had parallel careers as a coastguard officer and now as a sailor. All this time he has also traveled to Festivals and toured schools, universities, and arts centres to perform the stories.


“ A young, red-bearded poet from Stornoway carried off the coveted storytelling cup at Kinross Festival…. traditional and contemporary elements combined.”
Karl Dallas , Melody Maker

“Storytelling is alive and well in the outer Hebrides, if Ian Stephen, a coastguard from Stornoway, is anything  to go by.”
The Sunday Telegraph magazine

“ He sits like a master puppeteer to whose words everything must dance.”
Saleem Peeradina, Express Magazine, India.

“If you’ve never understood the lure of the sea, you haven’t heard Ian Stephen
explain it.”
The Scotsman, on “Voyagers”, a series broadcast on Radio Scotland.