Bì Glic!

Bì Glic! is a bilingual soundwalk for visitors to RSPB Balranald, North Uist, Western Isles of Scotland, using music, stories, field recordings and Gaelic birdlore to deepen understanding of the reserve's ecology, culture and living heritage. Bì Glic! is a bilingual, site-specific soundwalk created to mark the 60th anniversary of RSPB Balranald. The work was conceived and developed by composer and sound artist Duncan MacLeod and Shona MacLennan, RSPB Scotland's Community Engagement Officer for the Outer Hebrides, in collaboration with local communities in North Uist. The work takes listeners on an established 1.5-mile loop through the reserve, using the SonicMaps geolocative-audio web app to situate spoken word, field recordings, environmental sound and newly recorded music within the landscape. As listeners move through Balranald, material is encountered in response to particular places, habitats and features of the environment, allowing the landscape itself to shape the experience of the work. Developed through a six-month period of research and development, the project grew from research into Balranald's history, ecology and Gàidhlig culture, alongside conversations and collaboration with people connected to the place. This process brought together contemporary voices with archival recordings spanning more than 70 years of oral tradition, creating connections between past and present understandings of the landscape. Rather than treating the reserve simply as a backdrop for a story, Bì Glic! uses walking and listening to explore how landscape, wildlife, language, memory and human activity are interconnected. The route becomes a way of encountering Balranald simultaneously as a nature reserve, a crofting landscape, a township and a place shaped by generations of knowledge and cultural practice. Central to the work is the machair, an internationally significant habitat that is also a lived and worked cultural landscape. Stories of crofting, seasonal change and local knowledge sit alongside Gaelic birdlore, archival voices and accounts of the birds and wildlife found across the reserve. Gàidhlig is integral to this interpretation, offering ways of understanding and describing relationships between species, weather, place and people that are embedded within the language itself. Music forms an integral strand of Bì Glic!'s exploration of birds, place and cultural memory. The soundwalk features newly recorded performances by Uist musicians Shona Morrison (fiddle), Padruig Morrison (accordion), Alana MacInnes (pipes) and Màiri MacMillan (voice), drawing on a selection of traditional tunes and songs from the Western Isles connected to birds and birdlife. Rather than functioning simply as accompaniment, the music carries another form of cultural knowledge through the work, revealing how relationships with birds and the natural world are preserved within musical tradition as well as through Gàidhlig, story and oral history. Heard within the landscape, these recordings connect living musical practice with the places, species and traditions that shaped it. Created with and for the communities surrounding Balranald, the soundwalk brings local voices, music and knowledge into dialogue with archival material and the work of the RSPB. For visitors to Uist, it offers an alternative way of discovering the reserve, encouraging slower and more attentive engagement with the places through which they are moving. For the local community, it provides a platform through which cultural knowledge, memories and relationships with the landscape can be shared with new audiences. Bì Glic! therefore extends beyond conventional environmental interpretation. It asks how creative sound practice can communicate the cultural significance of a protected landscape alongside its ecological importance, and how listening might encourage greater attentiveness to the relationships between birds, people, language and place. Created for Balranald's 60th anniversary, the work also offers an ongoing legacy for the reserve, connecting its history with the communities and environments that continue to shape its future.