March 18, 2026
This is a four-part jig for Scottish smallpipes.
I named it after a 2009 bike ride across the Isle of Lewis, from Stornoway to Callanish on a slowly deflating rental bike with a hand-drawn map and no GPS.
Download sheet music.
MIDI playback:
I took a wrong turn at this intersection, which made the route more winding than planned.
Download sheet music.
After some confusion and a replacement inner tube I finally made it to Callanish and the Calanais Standing Stones. But I called a taxi for the return.
Before publishing “The Village Walk” last month, I went back and listened to my 2023 voice memo that inspired that tune. It was much different than I remembered — here’s the transcription:
MIDI playback:
I expanded the voice memo into a six-part tune, then worked with the piper and composer Ciar Milne to cut it down to four parts and polish it.
My original voice memo merged elements from two different tunes into the first line of a hybrid jig. The borrowed elements were:
CAE CAE) from “A Highland Jigg,” a 9/8 slip jig from Robert Millar’s handwritten manuscript of 1820.BCB A·) from “John Barbour’s 50th,” a modern 6/8 jig by Duncan Moore.I changed the final bar but kept several triplets from “A Highland Jigg,” which is tune number nine in the second section of the Millar manuscript, A Collection of Pibarachs, Laments, Salutes, Marches, Reels and Strathspeys, Principally adapted for the Great Highland Bagpipe:
The manuscript is available on Ross Anderson’s archived website, and its convoluted modern history is described on pages 21–29 of Piping Times from October, 2021.
A clean transcription of the tune, with one note changed, looks like this:
Download sheet music.
MIDI playback:
