Thanks, James, for another fine photo of Ian’s hometown area. He had Campbeltown’s mountain, Beinn Ghuilean (or Ben Guillion as Ian and others sometimes spell it), in mind when he penned his short story “The Moonlit Meeting” which can be read  by going to that section of our blog.

Ian describes the background to his story thus: “I wrote this short story around 2001 when I was living in Pictou, Nova Scotia. It was my first attempt at writing dialect, though this time it wasn’t Scots-English but Irish-English. I heard this dialect a lot as a youngster since my step-father, Bill Moorhead, was from Larne in Northern Ireland.

“When picturing ‘Mary’s Mountain’ I had Ben Guillion in mind, the mountain that I climbed many times just outside my hometown of Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula in Argyllshire, Scotland. On a clear day we could see the coast of Northern Ireland from Campbeltown.”