Sometime during the 1980s, I was lucky enough to hear Dougie MacLean perform at the Dumfries Folk Club, in the rather unglamorous setting of the Cairndale Hotel, ….audience, I am guessing, less than a hundred. I was impressed. I don’t know whether he still includes the didgeridoo in his act, but really it seemed likely that he could get music out of anything that came to hand.

MacLean is best known for his song Caledonia, but the song which has resonated most for me from that performance, was Solid Ground.

Down the Buckney den the burn crashes brown from
The Autumn spate

A “spate” I note is “a sudden flood in a river”, and just at this moment the idea of sudden flood is very much in the news. But in McLean’s song, the flood is a natural part of the seasonal cycle and something to be enjoyed rather than feared.

The title of the song recurs in the repeated line “We stand on Solid Ground on Solid Ground” . It is a reassuring image. And yet the song hints at the importance and vulnerability of our relationship to this “solid ground.”

We stand on Solid Ground
It’s the land-it is our wisdom
It’s the land-it shines us through
It’s the land-it feeds our children
It’s the land-

But I have stopped short: for it is the concluding words of this stanza – just one and a half lines – which have struck an indelible mark on my memory, perhaps because they overturn any complacent notion we may have about our responsibilities to the ground on which we stand.

…you cannot own the land
The land owns you

Listen to Dougie McLean singing Solid Ground from his album Real Estate.

And on a rather more prosaic note, though I think not unrelated, you might like to listen to this recent edition of the The Life Scientific where Jim Al-Khalili interviews Professor Myles Allan on Understanding Climate Change. Available as a podcast.