The Boat in the Writing Room
A new film retracing the origins of the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Stonypath, Little Sparta.
As part of the Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition at Hweg, I am pleased to be presenting this new film by art historian and Finlay biographer Alistair Peebles and director Micheal LLoyd.
The Boat in the Writing Room tells the story of an overlooked but transformational phase in the early career of the renowned Scottish poet, artist and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006).
The film's running time is c. 55 minutes. We will have a short mid-way break and an opportunity to stay and discuss afterwards.
The year that Ian Hamilton Finlay and his family spent at Gledfield Farmhouse in Ross-shire (now Sutherland) was a vital transitional stage in his dynamic career. Able at last to live again in the countryside, he now had space to bring his work into three-dimensional form. There too, his collaborative method became established, central to his later career, and he began to move definitively into classicism. During this period, with his partner Sue Finlay (now Swan), he first began to create a garden, forgotten precursor of the celebrated Stonypath, Little Sparta.
The wall-poems and constructions Finlay created at the site, successful in their own right, pointed the way towards his later work. Having left Edinburgh for Gledfield in May 1965, the couple lived there until June 1966, their son, Alec, being born in March. By October they were at Stonypath, and the rest is history.
Featuring contemporary photographs of life and work at Gledfield farmhouse, many previously unseen, the film provides a unique sense of its appearance at that time. In 1966 Finlay removed his wall-poems and other installations after a dispute with the landlords. The traces that remained, the discovery of which helped prompt this project, have now been erased by redevelopment. Along with other early landscapes, of Perthshire and Orkney, Stonypath is shown as it looked in 1966, and the garden at Little Sparta as it is now.
With contributions from Sue Swan, early collaborators Michael Hamish Glen of The Salamander Press, and artist and landscape architect Peter Lyle, and not least the eminent critic and historian Stephen Bann, Finlay’s friend and “preferred commentator” (Alec Finlay), the film evokes in detail the Gledfield era, and demonstrates its significance in the poet’s creative development.
The Boat in the Writing Room: retracing the origins of Stonypath, Little Sparta was first shown at Pier Arts Centre, Stromness on Tuesday 28th October 2025, on what would have been Finlay's 100th birthday. This will be the first showing outwith Scotland.
