Robert Macfarlane writes of all things archipelagic in The Guardian, Saturday 14th July, including reference to Clutag’s ARCHIPELAGO:
“Last month saw the appearance of a new journal called Archipelago, with which I have been involved. It was conceived of and is edited by the poet Andrew McNeillie, and its original aims were to provide a home for the new archipelagic art, and to inspire and embody a return to the land – and seascapes – of these islands. It is impressively rangy in terms of form (reportage, criticism, poetry, photographs and artwork) and language (English, Welsh, Gaelic, Russian and Anglo-Saxon). Established artists presenting new material include Seamus Heaney, Roger Deakin, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue, the painter Norman Ackroyd, the artist Julian Bell, the sculptor David Nash, and the photographer John Beatty. The issue also carries the work of emerging young writers, among them the Welsh novelist Angharad Price, and the Oxford poet Paul Abbott.”
To read the complete article, click here.
The first issue of ARCHIPELAGO was successfully launched as part of the Passionate Natures conference held at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 22-24 June 2007.
Readers included Andrew McNeillie (Senior Commissioning Editor, OUP, and Director of Clutag Press), Dr Leo Mellor (Fellow in English, New Hall College) and Robert Macfarlane (Fellow in English, Emmanuel College). They read from a selection of work by contributors including Roger Deakin, Seamus Heaney and Mick Imlah.
Look out for a feature on ARCHIPELAGO in the Guardian newspaper soon.
 
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue One, available Summer 2007
ARCHIPELAGO is to be a literary magazine in the ordinary sense, in that it will contain writings in non-fictional prose, and verse. Extraordinary will be its preoccupations with landscape, with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet, with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages, with the littoral and vestigial, the geological, and topographical, with climates, in terms of both meteorology, ecology and environment; and all these things as metaphor, liminal and subliminal, at the margins, in the unnameable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast, known variously in other millennia as Britain, Great Britain, Britain and Ireland etc; even, too, too readily, the United Kingdom (including the North of partitioned Ireland), though no such thing ever existed, other than in extremis during wartime, but in the letter. But while the unnameable archipelago is its subject, its vision is by implication global, and its concerns with the state of the planet could not be more of the hour.
The first issue features contributions by: Paul Abbott, Norman Ackroyd, John Beatty, Julian Bell, Roger Deakin, Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney, Mick Imlah, Nicolas Jacobs, Andrew Kahn, Michael Longley, Robert Macfarlane, Derek Mahon, Osip Mandelshtam, Andrew McNeillie, Gail McNeillie, David Nash, Bernard O’Donoghue, Angharad Price and Mark Williams.
ARCHIPELAGO is published by Clutag Press and will be launched at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 23rd June 2007. Orders will be supplied strictly on a first come first served basis, and will not be despatched before the launch date.
(110pp 170mm x 240mm)
Announcing the forthcoming publication of Ian Niall: Part of his Life by Andrew McNeillie, available March 2007
‘…We owe Andrew McNeillie a great debt for reintroducing us to the most neglected of writers.’
Douglas Gifford
Ian Niall was the pen name of John McNeillie (1916-2002). Between them they wrote more than forty books, over a period of as many years, from 1939 when at twenty-two John McNeillie published Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life, with Putnam of London and New York, a Scottish classic still in print, a book that raised a national controversy, leading to housing reform.
As Ian Niall, author of the novel No Resting Place (1948), filmed in Ireland by Paul Rotha, he would go on to establish himself as one of the finest rural writers and observers of the natural world of his time, beginning in 1950 with The Poacher’s Handbook and reaching another high point in 1967 with his memoir A Galloway Childhood. He would also return to forms of fiction, now masterfully grounded in the facts of actual lives. Throughout, for forty years, Ian Niall contributed the weekly ‘Countryman’s Notes’ to Country Life magazine, acquiring a devoted readership that spanned the world.
But little did the majority of his readers know about the man behind the name. For he kept much to himself, a man happiest in the wilderness, but with the greatest feeling for common humanity.
Iain Niall: Part of his Life - Andrew McNeillie
Announcing Geoffrey Hill’s forthcoming poetry reading event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Details are as follows:
GEOFFREY HILL: POETRY READING
AT THE SHELDONIAN
Poems from
FOR THE UNFALLEN (1959)
to
WITHOUT TITLE (2006)
7pm for 7.30-10.00pm 1st February 2006
Admission Free. Sponsored byOUP
Copies of A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill, published by Clutag Press (2005), will be available for sale at the event.
A Treatise of Civil Power - Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill Poetry Reading
1st February 2006
Poems from For the Unfallen (1959) to Without Title (2006)
Please note: this CD is not available for sale to customers in North America.
 John McNeillie
My Childhood
pp148. Thame: Clutag. £20.
0954727509
John McNeillie is better known as Ian Niall, under which pen name he became a major figure in British nature writing of the twentieth century. A Scotsman who ended up living in North Wales, McNeillie wrote more than forty books, mostly on rural themes. He was, notes his son (the poet Andrew McNeillie) in the introduction to My Childhood, “a kind of lyric poet in prose, and an elegist who had known Eden”. That Eden was North Clutag Farm, a remote steading in Wigtownshire in the Scottish borders, where McNeillie grew up under the care of his grandparents in the late 1910s and 20s. It is these years that are the subject of My Childhood – a previously unpublished work, and a minor masterpiece of rural memoir.
Continue reading TLS Review, 19th November 2004
My Childhood, John McNeillie’s previously unpublished account of his childhood and youth-time at North Clutag farm, will be launched at the Wigtown Booktown Sixth Annual Literary Festival on Saturday 25th September 2004.
Andrew McNeillie will be talking about the book and selling copies at the Festival.
My Childhood - John McNeillie
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CLUTAG from the Irish clúdach meaning cover or meadow.
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