About Our Music & Walking Tours

Photos & Stories for You

From 2006-2022, Dorothy (from Scotland) and I (from USA) led 23 music & walking tours for small groups to all parts of Scotland, and during the pandemic, 5 online concerts featuring musicians who would have joined us on tour. Over the years, some 60 of Scotland’s best musicians performed for our small groups, often presenting tunes and stories about the very areas where we walked. It was a unique and personal way to experience the richness of Scottish culture and history in the context of amazingly varied and beautiful sights.

• To those of you who have traveled with us, thank you very much for joining us — we enjoyed every trip!

• For those who hope to take one of our tours in the future, please note that we have taken the decision to call it a day on running our tours.

Join us here for photos and stories of our many trips, via this and future emails, and/or on my new publication on Substack, a platform for writers*. Watch for occasional audio and video, and who knows, perhaps an online concert down the road!

In addition, you now have access, if you wish, to MusicScapes of Scotland, a series of articles drawn from 24 years of music columns that I wrote for Scottish Life magazine — along with updates, audio, and new articles.

Below you’ll find a few favorites from among the many photos that I took during our music & walking journeys through the years. I’ll be sharing stories about these and many other images in upcoming posts, and Dorothy will be providing some guest posts as well.

Dorothy had nearly 40 years of experience leading walking tours throughout Scotland, working with her business partner Margaret, who for our tours mostly worked in the back office. Dorothy’s knowledge of the country, flora, fauna, history, crafts, allowed her to fill our days and yet never rush us through anything, and if anything unexpected came up she was able to seamlessly pivot to accommodate it. Combined with my 40 years of experience with Scotland’s music and musicians, we made a unique team!

I hope you enjoy our posts, and look forward to sharing them and reading your comments!

• (Please note: as one who signed up for the trips email list, you are here as a free subscriber. If you click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of any email, it will give you a choice of which sections you want to keep or unsubscribe from. There’s no paywall, so you can ignore invitations to become a paid subscriber unless you wish to support my work here and in the music articles. For those interested, I’ll soon be adding a totally separate publication about learning and teaching music, and another for essays and fiction.)

By the way, one of our travelers this summer is a novelist and posted a blog about her experiences. You might find it fun to read, especially since it includes several brief videos as well. We got to hear a few additional musicians and see more sights than she could fit in her blog — but stay tuned, we’ll get to it all!

(*Extra note: I’m new to Substack, so let me know if anything looks confusing or annoying! This platform is now home to many authors and commentators, such as Salman Rushdie and Heather Cox Richardson, and many writers who were laid off during the pandemic from newspapers and magazines — like me, when Scottish Life magazine was sold to a London conglomerate in 2020.)