My new show on Do Radio - Where to Next?

... airs September 1st!

The cave

Exciting news! I have a transmission date for the first episode of the programmes I have been busy making for Do Radio. It will be aired weekly from September 1st. The shows will be aired three times a day to hit different time zones and I will confirm exactly what times as soon as I have them.

Here is the background to the project and why I have renamed this Substack Follow the Stag. I plan to use it from now on for thoughts on each episode as well as footage before and after and for my writing more generally. I will also use this Substack to archive the programmes each week after they are aired.

This is the story of how it all came about.

After I left my business, I spent the next two years finishing a novel I have been writing for nearly a decade about our disconnection from nature. The research for that book led me to discover what is known about our mesolithic ancestors - the hunter gatherers we now believe came into the lands known as England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales from Spain in boats who arrived along the West coast. This was back after the end of the last ice-age when it is now believed only a few hundred of these hunter gatherer ancestors lived in the entirety of our landmass. For those who are interested, this is the time of Cheddar Man (the only complete skeleton that survives of our indigenous ancestors) who scientists believe had black skin and blue eyes.

After I finished writing the novel, I went on a pilgrimage to some of the locations in the book where it is known our mesolithic ancestors spent time. I’m still not quite sure what moved me to do it. All I know is that I felt compelled to connect with my ancestors and set off to try and find them. I spent five days driving vast distances (from Devon to Angelsey in Wales, and then up to North Scotland and finally the Western Isles of Skye and Raasay. I went on my own in my van and didn’t listen to the news or use my phone apart from checking in with family occasionally. Every day required five or six hours of driving to a remote location before exploring each place bare foot and for a time closing my eyes in a practice I have been doing for years now to see what is revealed to my imagination when I connect with the land.

I wanted to inhabit the characters in the book and think as they would think and feel as they would feel. It’s fair to say that I entered a very different headspace to the one I usually live within. I felt myself communing with the world on a different level. And all the while I seemed to encounter forms of rare wildlife. Perhaps this is not that unusual as I was visiting remote places but as one of the characters in the novel - a representation of mother nature or perhaps nature itself - regularly took the form of animals I felt on some level that I was living within the pages of my book. I know how odd that sounds. As I say, I was in a remarkable headspace.

The trip culminated in a six hour drive from the Cairngorms to Skye and then a ferry to Raasay where I drove until the road ended. I saw two eagles soaring in the distance as I went, which I took as another good omen. Parking up I saw the sign for where the path led - Rona. My destination was not that island, but a cave I had read about in an obscure journal online some fifteen kilometres away and off the main path just before Rona itself. It was one of the relatively few places where archeological evidence has proven our mesolithic ancestors came.

The walk to find the cave was long and arduous - the most remote place I had ever visited and as I went the fatigue and otherworldliness seemed to capture me. I turned on myself for a time, telling myself how weak I was and how I was not cut out for such an adventure. That I would have an asthma attack and that if I fell no-one would come and rescue me. I think lack of food and sleep had by now begun to claim me. But eventually I came to where I would have to leave the path to find the cave.

I had to walk through bracken far higher than me and worried about spiders and then I knew I had travelled into a different form of consciousness when I began to panic that those mesolithic ancestors I had come to find might actually still be there. I know how odd it seems to write that, but I genuinely was worried that they would be there at the time.

Once out of the bracken I saw the sea and Skye in the distance. Down below was a small pool, with water gently lapping the rocks. It was a warm summer day. The perfect place to land a boat, I thought. Then I turned right to where I thought the cave would be and saw two huge boulders with a path between them. As I climbed up the path I saw the top of the cave and felt my body tremble. It was much larger than I expected and a reddy orange colour, which I had not considered. But as I came out in front of it my heart stopped. Inside, sitting down and facing away from me but now getting to its feet, was the largest stag I have ever seen.

It turned to me, stood and began to bark and shout. I tried to film it but I dropped my phone because I was now trembling. It was not to be filmed. I was not afraid though. Even when it continued to stare at me growling. I was rooted to the spot. Then it leapt down towards me and turned right and bounded away.

What happened next I have revisited again and again. I was swept with the most delicious feeling I have ever experienced. A kind of mix of relief. Of being seen and that being ok. I laughed at the feeling. It was joy maybe. I felt so relaxed as well. I felt light. In terms of weight but also light itself. I felt full. At one with the world. I just can’t quite express it. But it felt wondrous. And it seared my soul in some way because I can feel it now while I’m typing. It will never leave me.

I was still twitchy though. And it took some time for me to actually go into the cave. And when I came out of it the spell, whatever it was, had been broken and I was myself again. The liminal doorway had closed and I felt astonishingly revived. I practically bounced back to the car.

In the months since that experience, I have felt the stag in my mind often. I don’t know what it means but the story of it has taken on a life of its own because it is the story that led indirectly to the programmes I am making for Do Radio. I am not a religious person. I have not dwelt often with the sacred. But there is something about my desire for an indigenous knowledge and letting loose my creative impulses after a decade in the entrepreneurial and business world that has led to the conversations I am having now about life and meaning.

My goal for the series and for my life overall is to make sense of what it means to live before I die. This is the enquiry I took with me when I met my first interviewee Martin Shaw (Episode 1). I told Martin the story of the stag as our time together came to an end and as I did it he changed in front of me. He came alive and advised me on what to do - and what not to do - with the experience. When I left he gave me a book and patted me on the back as he showed me to the door ‘so that’s why you came’ he said.

When I got home I opened the book he gave me - Scatterlings – and I saw the inscription.

‘Follow The Stag” it said.

And so I am. In my life and in these episodes.

I hope you enjoy them.

The first episode with Martin airs on September 1st.

Much love,

Dan