Ian Grosz recently featured on BBC Radio Scotland podcast 'Scotland Outdoors' with Helen Needham, taking a walk up Barra Hill near Oldmeldrum to talk about place, about time, the landscape as narrative, and what draws Ian personally to the hill.
In this podcast on BBC Radio Scotland, second-year PhD research student and writer Ian Grosz talks with Helen Needham about hidden histories laying dormant in the landscape, describing how the identity of the village of Oldmeldrum comes from an Iron Age hill fort that has evidence of occupation going back much further. Ian's research project takes an auto-ethnographic approach to place and identity to explore the ways in which landscapes can shape a sense of who we are. Barra Hill was an important starting point for Ian's research, which showed how the Gaelic root for the village's name related directly to the hill and was adopted by the family who once presided over the ancient burgh: the hill itself a source of identity for the landowning family and the people of the early settlement. Ian describes how the landscape as a whole can be seen as narrative, its stories still shaping a sense of who we are through the ways in which we attach history and memory to place.