Gorm is the Scottish Gaelic word for a colour encompassing the boundary of English ‘green’ and ‘blue’. The Gorm project was a poetic inquiry into local people’s experiences of swimming, paddling and sailing around the coast of the Northwest Highland Geopark area (i.e. the north and west coastal corner of mainland Scotland) as part of a wider research project into perceptions and stories of the marine environment. The results are gathered on a website called Blue Corridor.

I created thirteen poems and pieces of poem-ish writing from the words and phrases of project participants in community and small group meetings or interviews, some online, some in person, in response to questions about the marine environment, perceptions of the land from the sea and climate change. Themes that emerged included friendship and danger, plastic and diesel, teachers and time machines. The results demonstrate the power of poetry to meld thoughts and feelings about human entanglement within our natural environment, especially the sea.