AS the light shone first onto our own faces, I didn’t realise that by the end of the performance I would feel so buffeted. Polwart’s stage presence is stronger than the average Scottish gale. She’s everything: nimble, canny, a wise woman in the truest sense of the words. Now a Robert the Bruce spider, now an earnest teacher (the sort that still loves her subject), now a full choir blasting us with chords that rolled over us like waves.

I was left breathless by opulent descriptions of the Midlothian moor, or birds, or seeds, or moss. Her rich voice and tenor guitar, the effortless switching between words and song. As the narratives stacked up like an overlapping patchwork of natural grasses, I bounced weightlessly between the woman before me, and the stories of women gone before me.[ . . . ] More at: Music review: Breathless power and resistance from singer Karine Polwart | The National