From ancient Gaelic songs carried across glens to contemporary folk musicians finding new audiences around the world, the music of the Scottish Highlands has always been more than entertainment. It is a way of remembering, of belonging and of giving voice to the region. As Fort William Mountain Festival’s Mountain Voices: Stories & Song brought together musicians, poets, writers and storytellers, it reminded us that mountains are there to be listened to, rather than solely climbed.
There are few landscapes where music and place are as inseparable as they are in the Scottish Highlands. Long before maps marked ridges or guidebooks described routes, the mountains were already alive with song. Music echoed through glens, travelled across lochs and accompanied every stage of Highland life, from work and celebration to grief, migration and remembrance. Today, the Highlands continue to inspire artists in countless forms, and nowhere was that more apparent than at Fort William Mountain Festival’s Mountain Voices: Stories & Song. While our festival is known for celebrating adventure, climbing and the outdoors, this gathering of musicians, writers, poets and storytellers explores another vital dimension of mountain culture; the creative traditions that have emerged from the place we call home over centuries. It is a reminder that every summit has its stories.
To understand Highland music is to understand that it always belonged in a multitude of venues; in homes, on crofts, beside peat fires and on long journeys across difficult country. Songs were practical as much as beautiful, they helped with the rhythm of hard labour, they accompanied seasonal gatherings and preserved history long before it was written down.
Gaelic culture was, above all, an oral culture. Stories, poems and songs carried knowledge from one generation to the next. A melody could preserve a genealogy, and a lament could record the death of a clan chief. A work song could synchronise the rhythm of women beating newly woven cloth. These waulking songs, (òran luaidh – a traditional Scottish Gaelic work song sung by women to keep a steady rhythm while beating, or waulking, tweed cloth to soften and thicken it) with their hypnotic call and response patterns, transformed communal work into communal music, while allowing endless verses of local stories and playful improvisation.
Elsewhere, the haunting melodies of the piobaireachd tradition (also known as ceòl mòr, the “great music“) elevated the Great Highland bagpipe into an instrument capable of extraordinary emotional range. Far removed from the military associations many people now recognise, classical pipe music expressed sorrow, pride, celebration and remembrance in compositions that often commemorated specific places and events.
The mountains themselves were constant companions. They became landmarks in songs, metaphors in poetry, and silent witnesses to generations of Highland lives.
The Highlands were historically not an easy place to live; their beauty has always existed alongside hardship. The Jacobite uprisings, the suppression of Highland culture following Culloden, and later the Highland Clearances, transformed communities forever. Entire settlements disappeared from glens whose names survive only on maps and weather forecasts, and yet the music endured. Indeed, many of Scotland’s most poignant songs emerged directly from these periods of upheaval. Songs of exile mourned families forced overseas, other songs remembered homes left behind, others quietly preserved the Gaelic language at a time when speaking it was actively discouraged. Unlike written history, songs carried emotion as well as fact. They captured not only what happened, but how it felt. It’s likely that this is why Highland music continues to resonate so deeply today. It is so much more than heritage preserved behind museum glass, it remains living testimony to resilience, belonging and identity.
That living tradition was beautifully reflected in this year’s Mountain Voices line-up.
Knoydart musician Lachie Robinson represents a new generation of performers carrying Scottish traditional music into the future. Having progressed from local cèilidhs to stages including Blas and Celtic Connections, and as a recent semi-finalist in the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition, Lachie demonstrates how traditional music continues to evolve without losing sight of its roots. His journey mirrors the path of Highland folk music itself. Once confined largely to local communities, it now reaches audiences around the world while remaining firmly connected to the land that shaped it.
Equally significant is the presence of internationally acclaimed musicians Megan Henderson and Ewan Robertson, members of the pioneering folk band Breabach. Their music draws deeply on Highland tradition while embracing contemporary arrangements and global influences. In doing so, they exemplify one of Scottish folk music’s greatest strengths: an ability to honour the past without becoming trapped by nostalgia. The Highlands have never been culturally static. Their music has always absorbed new influences while remaining unmistakably rooted in place. Henderson and Robertson continue that centuries-old conversation.
What makes Mountain Voices particularly distinctive is its recognition that music is only one thread in the wider tapestry of Highland storytelling. Performance poet Caroline Burrows, whose work explores place, language and lived experience, reminds us that poetry has long stood alongside song within Gaelic tradition. Historically, poets held positions of immense importance within clan society, recording significant events and celebrating both landscape and lineage. Although today’s poets work in different forms and languages, many continue to explore the same questions: What does it mean to belong to a place? How do landscapes shape identity? What stories deserve to be remembered?
Those themes are echoed by Lindsay Oliver, whose poetry, written in both English and Doric, reflects the richness of Scotland’s linguistic heritage. While Doric belongs primarily to the north-east rather than the Gaelic-speaking west, its inclusion serves as a reminder that Scotland’s mountain cultures have always been multilingual, with different traditions meeting across geographical boundaries.
Meanwhile, Lochaber singer Alice Lynch brought a younger voice to the programme, illustrating that Highland musical traditions are not simply being preserved, they are being renewed. Every new interpretation, every fresh performance and every emerging artist becomes part of an ongoing cultural inheritance.
The festival also celebrated another ancient Highland tradition; storytelling. Before printed books became commonplace, stories travelled on foot. Travellers carried them from glen to glen. These stories explained unusual rock formations, remembered heroic deeds or warned of dangerous places hidden among the mountains. Lochaber storyteller Rich Mitchell continues this practice by using imagination and narrative to deepen people’s connection with the natural world. His work reflects something increasingly recognised by outdoor educators and conservationists alike; that facts alone rarely inspire lasting relationships with landscapes. Stories do. A mountain known only for its height becomes far richer when accompanied by local legends, historical memories or family histories. Storytelling transforms scenery into place.
The inclusion of artists and writers such as Suzy Devey, Phoebe Sleath, Karen Emslie and Peter Biggar expanded the conversation beyond performance into observation and reflection. Suzy’s work, spanning printmaking, painting and mixed media, emerges from time spent travelling through mountain landscapes, while geologist and artist Phoebe Sleath brings scientific understanding together with watercolour and sketching. Their practices echo a long Scottish tradition of artists attempting to capture the Highlands, not just as dramatic scenery, but as places rich with emotional and geological history. Karen, whose essays frequently explore the relationship between nature and creativity, reminds us that writing itself can become a form of listening. Rather than simply describing landscapes, thoughtful nature writing invites readers to notice more deeply. Peter, climber, hillwalker and recipient of the WH Murray Prize, represents another important strand of mountain culture. As a writer deeply immersed in Scotland’s climbing and walking traditions, his work demonstrates that adventure literature is itself part of the Highlands’ evolving cultural record. Every generation leaves behind not only new routes, but new ways of understanding the mountains.
What distinguishes Highland music from many other traditions is its deep relationship with community. A cèilidh has never depended upon professional performers alone, it belongs equally to those dancing, singing choruses or simply listening on the sidelines. Its music is participatory rather than performative. This communal spirit feels increasingly important in an age dominated by headphones, streaming services and individual playlists. Gatherings like Mountain Voices and our annual festival cèilidh create something increasingly rare; shared listening. For an evening, audiences become participants in traditions stretching back centuries, songs are heard not through algorithms but in the company of others, surrounded by mountains that inspired many of us in the first place.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate setting than Fort William. Beneath Britain’s highest mountain, with Glen Nevis reaching west towards the sea and the Great Glen cutting through the Highlands, this has long been a meeting place of travellers, climbers, crofters, musicians and storytellers.
Traditional culture is sometimes misunderstood as something fragile, something preserved unchanged for fear of losing it, but the Highlands challenge this narrative.
Their musical and oral traditions have survived precisely because they have adapted. Gaelic songs sit comfortably alongside newly written folk ballads, contemporary arrangements breathe fresh life into centuries-old melodies, and as we have seen, young musicians and poets reinterpret inherited repertoire without diminishing its significance.
The result is not cultural preservation in the museum sense, but cultural continuity.
Festivals play a vital role in sustaining that continuity. They create opportunities for established artists and emerging voices to share stages, exchange ideas and reach new audiences. Walk anywhere in the Highlands and you are moving through layers of human experience accumulated over centuries. As walkers, climbers and runners, we often speak of reading the landscape; understanding weather, terrain and geology. Yet the Highlands ask something more of us, they ask us to listen. Listen to the names that survive in Gaelic; listen to songs that remember vanished communities; listen to stories that give character to hills that might otherwise appear anonymous; and not least listen to the musicians, poets and storytellers who continue to find fresh meaning in ancient places.
The Highlands have never stopped singing. Their music has changed with every generation, shaped by hardship and celebration, silence and survival. It has travelled from village kitchens to international concert stages, from oral tradition to digital streaming, while never losing its essential connection to place. For anyone who has stood on a summit in the hush after the wind drops, that may not come as a surprise. Mountains have always had voices. Sometimes, if we are fortunate enough to gather together and listen, they sing through us.
If you are interested in performing at the 2027 Mountain Voices event, please complete https://forms.gle/ACPP1FqkSx28LNuv5
Photos by Elly Lucas / @elly_lucas