The year is 2055.

I’m a storyscaper living here in Dunkeld.

I’ve spent the last 33 years finding, excavating and building stories in our landscapes.

I didn’t always have roots here. I’d just begun to put them down when the Rains came.

We lost everything.

But in truth —  the things that mattered most, we’d lost a long time before that.

We learned the hard way.  We realised how worthless our things were when the Rains came and washed everything away. We learned our wealth comes from our communities, it’s stored in our stories.
My job was to find it and put it back. Carve our stories out of and into the landscape.

We didn’t know what we were doing when we began the Storyscape project. But then patterns began to emerge.

We found old routes on the old maps. Drovers Roads. Bike tracks. Train lines. Dual carriageways.They’re buried under the mud now. But the stories we stitched back together formed new paths of perspective. They ran like threads through the landscape, through the fabric of community, weaving our people back together through space and time.

Today, if you go out into the hills, where the great Laird’s larches used to be — if you wear your AR headsets, you’ll see them.
Hundreds of stories strung up like prayer flags, or bunting. Those are our memories draped through the landscape. Prayers to the future and for the past.

Over the years of storyscaping, we asked our community to share their stories with us. We asked them about memories they cherish, and what makes Dunkeld special to them. Then we stitched all the stories together and looped them around the local lands to make our storyscape.

Here, I’ll share three of my favourite stories from our paths of perspective.