Echoing Heath - Guided Walk Exploring History and Lore, from Kingussie

Aila Schafer, who runs Landscape Lore, is a researcher and historian based in the Highlands. Having grown up and worked in various countries, she then studied European Literatures at Marburg and Durham Universities, before completing her MRes on ‘Landscape’s Constitutive Agency in Macpherson’s Ossianic Collections: The Liminal Sublime in Ossian’s Landscape’ at UHI. Subsequently, she became the curator of a small independent museum, where she embraced the museum space as a place for learning, curiosity and creativity. There, she developed a special exhibition on agentic nature in connection with the Ossianic Collections, and she created a cultural programme centred around oral and regional traditions.

Through her museum work, she started dealing with counter narratives and marginalised voices in exhibitions. Encouraged by this, as well as her continuing research on oral stories that have been kept alive by marginalised cultures, and her own heritage, she started Landscape Lore, offering tours and talks that embrace storytelling and its connection to the natural environment.