When I moved from Yorkshire to the Highlands of Scotland in 1989, initially to a little village called Hilton, on the Nigg Peninsula, I loved the peace after years of driving up and down the English motorways.

I was lucky enough to be handed a couple of schools projects, and, in time, this led to my present part-time job as an arts worker for the Highland Council in Ross and Cromarty. This has thrown up some exciting opportunities.

For example, I've organised one-day harp-making workshops, got a Sacred Harp singing group together, and produced the music for a number of dramatic events. In 1994 I wrote and directed the music for a huge outdoor production based on the real Macbeth (rather than Shakespeare's). It was exciting and hair-raising, because each week at rehearsals a new musician would turn up. We started with three and ended up with 27, including half a dozen singers, a viola player, several violins, a French horn and four teeneage electric guitarists chugging away at the back.

The following year saw a community production of my music-drama Storm, based on the famous story of the Selkie Wife. It was staged in Cromarty, a sell-out every night. For me the highlight was the trip home on the Nigg ferry each evening, after a leisurely pint in Cromarty's Royal Hotel. In 1995 I also recorded, produced and arranged, with singers Ellen Jack and Donald MacAskill the recording of Gaelic nursery songs, Am Bodach Beag, which is used by playgroups all over Scotland.

In 1996, the Highland Council put out Breaking the Silence: Music Inspired by the Picts, a collaboration with harper Bill Taylor, and Henry Fosbrooke, who makes and plays his own drums; and in the same year Rhiannon Records put out The Last Wolf, a CD of my songs recorded with Highland-based musicians.

For the last four years and more I've been running The Merry Dancers Storytelling Project, which has brought together storytelling with other art forms, linked schools with their communities, and issued recordings of traditional storytellers. In 2004 an animation made with first year art students from Tain Academy, as part of the project, won an engageScotland Art in Education Award.

Freelance work has recently become increasingly rich and varied. Recent recording projects include From Sea to Sea, a compilation of songs, music, stories and memories, and readings about the Caledonian Canal, and a CD of lullabies with Highland singer Chrissie Stewart. This was been very well-received and Chrissie and I have now made another CD, A Bairn's Kist, along with harper Bill Taylor and fiddler Olivia Ross.

The schools show Roots and Flutes tours England a couple of times a year, and I've been doing a lot of storytelling, particularly in Scotland, both in schools and festivals. In 2003 my show The Last Wolf: and Other Stories - traditional tales and original songs about wolves - was launched at the Bleddfa Arts Centre in Powys and featured in the International Storytelling Festival in Edinburgh, as well as receiving Highland airings in Tain, Ardross, Portmahomack, the Findhorn Foundation, and Groam House Pictish Museum in Rosemarkie.

In the summer of 2004, I was invited to Iceland for some storytelling with Orkney's Tom Muir and Lawrence Tulloch from Shetland, two of the finest Northern tale-men. I've also done some "prehistoric" storytelling, with music, around the Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Kilmartin Glen in Argyll.

An enormous pleasure was to be able to launch Out of the Stones, a CD made for Orkney Islands Council, in Kirkwall's St Magnus Cathedral in late 2005. Bill Taylor and James Ross were with me, as well as children from Papdale School, and it was wonderful to be able to tell the story of How the Sea became Salt with the children joining in, and to hear Bill and James perform the famous Hymn to St Magnus with just a harp and solo voice, close to the pillar where the bones of Magnus himself are still interred.In the summer of 2005 I also directed the community play in Banchory, played to a packed house in the historic Mull Theatre, and led storywalks in Glen Nevis, Beinn Eighe, Ardgay oakwoods, and other beautiful places.

Highlights of 2006 were a return to Kilmartin, and work during the summer telling stories for Historic Scotland at Bonawe Iron Furnace in Argyll. I returned to the Whitby Folk Festival after a couple of years' break, and the same year also saw the re-release of my 1970s Transatlantic recordings on Bob Pegg: Keeper of the Fire. At the close of the year I was commissioned by Radio 3's The Verb to write a new song for the Dark Months.

With a storytelling residency in Huntly now completed, a major Riddling Storywalk for the Highland Folk Museum past its first stage (with a possible publication to come), and a first visit to Shetland in May, future work in 2007 includes an animation project with Timespan Museum, the rolling community project A Tale Gathering, with Artsplay Highland, and a commission from the Forestry Commission to write and record four pieces of music for a walk up the legendary Glen More in the Cairngorms, which will take place over three weeks during November. I'm working on this as part of a team with sculptor Diane MacLean and lighting artist Malcolm Innes. It's going to be a spectacular event, and I'll give more details nearer the time.

2007 is also the Highland Year of Culture, and has given me lots of opportunites to work in highland schools. There's a particularly exciting project with artist Jane Bregazzi and schools on The Black Isle to make a series of eight wall hangings for Fortrose Library. The hangings are based on stories collected by the 19th century son of Cromarty, Hugh Miller, in his classic 1838 book Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, and I hope they'll help to make people aware what a remarkable man Miller was.