Month: July 2018

This month we have a series of exciting workshops coming to Glengorm. First up is a full-day nature writing course with award winning writers Rose Skelton and Nomi Stone. In this one day intensive course, we will look at writing techniques that can be used across the genres of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and then use some of those tools as we walk, observe and write along the spectacular coastline of the Glengorm Estate.

Here is a little information about the amazing tutors that will be running the workshop:

Rose Skelton is a long-time Mull resident, currently working on HOMESCAR, a collection of short stories set on an island in Scotland, which won the Larry Levis Fellowship for Fiction in 2017. Two of those stories will be published in literary journals in 2018, and she was recently short-listed for the Bridge Emerging Writing Award. Rose was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She now teaches creative writing and trains investigative journalists, but was previously a freelance journalist in west Africa, working for the BBC, The Guardian, the Sunday Times, and others. She is a banjo player and is a volunteer member of the Tobermory Lifeboat crew.

Nomi Stone is an American anthropologist and a poet who spends her summers in Mull. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript entitled FIELDWORKERS OF THE SUBLIME which is a series of poems looking at wonder, nature and scientists. “KILL CLASS,” her second collection of poems, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2019. Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, Nomi’s poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, and elsewhere. She teaches at Princeton University and has an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College

To book, please email ranger@glengormcastle.co.uk or call 07387971782

Click here for more information. 

Our landscape at Glengorm is always changing and evolving, some of it planned and sadly, some of it unexpected. First of all you would have noticed the Rhododendron trees being cleared from around the castle, opening up the views out to sea, but leaving the hills looking somewhat bare without them. Then, you will have noticed a huge area of larch trees also disappearing as you near the castle.

Last year the estate was surveyed for signs of a tree disease named Phytophthora Ramorum (larch tree disease),  that was first found in Sussex in 2002 and has since spread across the UK. Unfortunately P.Ramorum was found in some of Glengorm’s rhododendrons and in turn, the disease had also spread to our larch trees. P.Ramorum is a fungus like pathogen called a water mould which causes extensive damage and death to a wide range of trees and other plants. It is found predominantly in the west of the UK, in wet areas, so of course here on Mull we have the perfect conditions for it. The disease is carried by spores and can be spread easily through the air. The disease does not always kill the rhododendrons, but they carry a huge amount of the spores and can quickly spread the disease to larch trees. The infected larch trees shed their needles prematurely as they become wilted and blackened, many trees also suffering from cankers or wounds, on the branches and upper trunk. To tackle the disease a large number of rhododendron were dug up and destroyed, with many of our larch trees also being felled.

Though the beautiful Glengorm landscape looks somewhat barren without many of our trees, we have hopefully managed to stop this horrific disease in it’s tracks, before it kills hundreds more larch trees. Looking to the future we hope to replant some of the areas with mixed woodland containing more deciduous trees and even look create wildflower meadows to encourage even greater biodiversity at Glengorm.