Big Adventures with Paula McGuire


THE one thing I learned from contortionist Irina Kazakova is that being flexible can help you out of a lot of tight spaces – although, of course, it can also put you into them. I’ve always been a little on the supple side. But while my toes and ears could meet easily enough in adolescence though, their friendship has sadly become strained in latter years.

My joints don’t quite creak on impact, but only because the foley guy forgot his rusty hinge. Although my tendons have tightened across the decades, my overall flexibility levels have stretched without limit. Stamping out anxiety has somehow loosened my shoulders and I’m now much more adaptable than I have ever been. I don’t imagine there’s a correlation, but the structure suits my narrative purpose.

I guess I’d just never realised how much easier life can be when every moment isn’t planned to within a nanosecond of its existence. To me, contingency was like Trump: I knew it was out there but didn’t ever want to deal with its implications. Plans weren’t guidance, they were legislation, and to break them was to earn a five-stretch in the prison of my own nervous system. I’m still not exactly a flow-goer, but adventure has definitely helped me to see the beauty in change. I recognise now that being able to curve around the world, instead of willing its trajectory to follow my own, saves a lot of mental energy and possibly a great deal of fossil fuel.

This week then, I was doubly enamoured with the opportunity to try a new craft with a woman whose life has been about as flexible as the boughs with which she works – and those things can hold cradles. Well, only until they rock, I suppose.

If Special Branch Baskets isn’t your first port of call for all things, woven then your navigation system is steering you off course. Fencing, coracles, and your choice of bins and basins; Special Branch Baskets will uncover the best twigs available and bring them in for a severe caning.

If you didn’t see what I did there,

I truly envy your naivety.

I visited the company’s owner and weaver, Jane Wilkinson, at her workshop in Alyth to wend my way through the basics of hedgerow basketry in the beautiful Perthshire countryside.

When I said Jane’s life has been flexible, I wasn’t just shuffling the plot along: The woman’s feet are itchier than bedbugs in a horsehair mattress – and she’s amassed the skills needed to scratch them. From a commune in Fife to a conservation project on the Dighty Burn, Jane has loaned her hands to more environments than the Next Generation, building on her childhood love of the outdoors. Jane is so enamoured with the world outside her window that she sailed to Orkney with a friend after only four lessons on a boat, only to cycle back across the mainland – for a holiday, no less.

It makes my four days strolling around the Black Forest seem like a cakewalk.

Alongside her daughter Derryth, Jane set up Special Branch Baskets as an outlet for their combined creativity. Now, as part of the Alyth Craft Tourism project, it is helping to bring holidaymakers to the area to sample new and traditional crafts from Scottish practitioners. With courses in creative basket-weaving and coracle-making among her contributions, Jane, along with her fellow organiser Clare Cooper, hopes to encourage crafters and beginners alike into the town over the next

12 months. She has teamed up with local accommodation providers to provide the visitors with somewhere to stay.

Jane began my first lesson in basketry by introducing me to the supplies – a stock of buff willow. Before you get excited, there’s no six-pack on this particular specimen; buff simply referring to its boiled and barkless state. While showing me how to start forming a three-by-three round base, creating a slath with six sticks in a cross formation, Jane described her journey to the small-town studio space in which she’s built a business and a life, painting a backdrop of constructing forest tree-houses and catching moonbeams in basins with her then infant daughter.

It all probably sounds a bit bead-wearing and shoeless, but the result was a parent-child dynamic that is as circular as the basket that was forming in my hands. Their relationship is symbiotic and co-operative because Jane has always felt she had just as much to learn from her offspring as the youngster ever had from her. Working together, they made their own path – often literally – and wound with it wherever it led. At 19, Derryth can just as easily wield an axe as tackle a tax return, and that’s a set of skills every girl should have before moving to Glasgow.

Before long, my basket base was complete, and it was time, at last, to arm ourselves. Weaving is a dangerous game, folks, and I wasn’t prepared for a bare-knuckle scrap. Jane handed me a knife and the field was levelled, as I learned to cut the willow ends to enough of a point to then drive them into the base. After a little more weaving, in what I now know was a three-rod wale, Jane, my classmate Gayle Ritchie and I headed for the hills.

Alyth Hill, in case you didn’t know, is the perfect place to source a basket. Not fully formed, you understand; they’re not indigenous. But among the ivy and dogwood growing at the path’s edge is, well, more ivy and dogwood that can be snaffled and woven into baskets. Guided by Gayle’s adorable Labrador, Toby, we headed back to the workshop to sit outside in the sunshine and make weeds into wicker. It all felt very civilised, especially when Clare brought out the tray of tea and biscuits.

Maybe it was the atmosphere, maybe it was Jane’s contagious energy, maybe it was all those competing plant fumes, but that Monday afternoon spent counting larch stems while gazing out across rural Perthshire was nothing short of idyllic.

Toby shambled between the tables, marking the day with a languid grace, and slowly the basket walls crept higher, as evening encroached.

Periodically, our teacher wrested the creations from our toiling fingers, only to dump them in a convenient wheelie bin – but that’s all part of the process, of course, as the bin serves as a soaking bath to keep the willow pliable.

Another cuppa later and we were trimming the stalks to twist into a border, in a beautifully caffeinated fugue. In keeping with my own nature, this basket of mine had veered ever-so from the track chosen for it, finding its joy instead in a slight lean, as though the wind had caught it unawares.

This amalgam of wayside scrub, with its reddish dogwood hues and festive larch cones, now takes the proudest of places in my home, reminding me daily that no matter what hill the world sets before me, as long as I bend with its bearing, I’ll reach the top with a basket and a better view on life.

For more details about craft trips in Alyth, you can find Alyth Craft Tourism on Facebook and Twitter.