“The love of place can sustain a life, and we usually talk as though it’s an unreciprocated love, a one-way street… That is wrong. The places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us.”

Rebecca Solnit in the introduction to ‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World’, a collection of essays by the late travel writer Barry Lopez, the book I’m currently reading.

As much as hope pulls me forward this Hogmanay, I cannot help but look back.

The first year of this new decade was shock and home. 2021 was panic, then a long exhale of a November weekend in Lochaber, silver moon and russet hills, reminding me that I was still somehow anchored. The following year was family, treading water, waiting on better news.

And 2023 has been the gradual turning of the tide.

Time, telephone calls, thoughts, talk — all held under a lens, looked at, and loved. The slow growth of days and confidence. Trying to understand my limits and respect them when they protected me, or challenge them when they fenced me in. Another loss, the white quiet of it.

The path remains rocky, but it’s eased by returning and deepening my relationship to places in Scotland, often with the people I love. Retracing favourite trails on foggy weekends, visiting childhood campsites with family, introducing new friends to familiar corners of Fife.

Here are the places that, as Solnit says, have steadied and sustained me in 2023.

January: South Fife

Watching cold cloud move over the town, delivering all kinds of wintry weather. Small birds hanging on empty branches, looking for leftovers. Keeping the fairy lights up for longer, as if to kindle the promise of fresh starts.

February: Ochil Hills

Ending the shortest month with an unexpectedly wonderful short hike up Ben Shee in the Ochils, fingers freezing around our lunch, eyes eating up the views across Scotland, all the way back to the west coast and home.

March: Central Belt

Orbiting between our garden and kitchen table in Fife, and my parents’ home on the west coast for dinner. Watching Scotland lose at rugby.

April: Benderloch

A prologue of spring sunshine on a forest walk near Drymen, then a long weekend away in the caravan near Ardmucknish Bay. Colours returning: yellow gorse, bluebells, and verdant Atlantic rainforest.

May: South Fife

Mostly spent in our small garden, brightening the wall and half painting the fence.

June: Benderloch

Back at Ardmucknish Bay and we’re greeted with an early heatwave. The year’s first sticky application of suncream, fish suppers sitting outside, pale feet in shallow water. Watching my father take an impromptu swim. My heart bathed in peach sunset light.

July: Mallaig

Two weeks in Lochaber, the longest trip in the caravan yet. The hum of that autumnal summer. Loch swims, sea paddles, hiking heather-covered hills, searching for cowries in pale sand, canoeing. Filling my mind with memories before the nights slowly swell.

August: Kinghorn

Summer’s last gasp on the Forth Estuary, enjoying supermoon tides and evening swims with new friends from work.

September: Kinross

Revisiting favourite walks near Drymen and Kinross, exhaling under evergreens and tasting autumn in the air.

October: Kincraig

Between weather warnings and extreme storms, a stolen trip up to Kincraig in the caravan. On the Friday, Uath Lochans are quiet. It feels like a film set. We float between tall trees to the crag, somehow still surprised at the scene below. The lochans stare up at us like orbs of onyx.

November: Lomond Hills

Between the life admin (car problems, chores, gift shopping) we share some familiar corners of Fife with new friends and family.

December: South Fife

A pair of binoculars, and on the hill miles open out before me. I can see words on both a crane and a plane in the distance; the mustard-yellow lighthouse on the island; wind turbines at the estuary mouth.

There is so much more beyond.

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