Grace Stewart-Skinner is a remarkable young musician and composer bringing positive change to her birthplace, Avoch on the Black Isle, through her groundbreaking project, Auchies Spikkin Auchie.

The project celebrates and elevates the distinctive Auchie dialect of Scots, a language deeply connected to Avoch’s fishing heritage but historically overlooked and underrepresented in oral history archives. Grace recorded locals speaking in the unique dialect and used these recordings as the foundation and inspiration for original music. The resulting concept album beautifully blends contemporary Scottish traditional composition with authentic oral histories, creating a powerful celebration of the community’s culture and lived experience.

Avoch’s close-knit fishing community has historically faced economic hardship and social prejudice. Grace’s work challenges those perceptions by placing the village’s voices, stories and heritage at its centre. As a direct descendant of the Avoch fishery, she recognised the lack of authentic representation of Auchie in existing archives and took it upon herself to address this gap, creating new archival recordings from people who grew up speaking the dialect and used it throughout their lives.

As a musician with cerebral palsy, Grace is no stranger to hard work. She independently devised, developed and sought funding for every aspect of Auchies Spikkin Auchie, securing support from organisations and crowdfunding, while also designing the album artwork. Grace is acutely aware of the need of accessibility in all aspects of music and so learned braille in order to feature it on the CD cover.

The project was the only Scottish finalist in the prestigious Folk Album of the Year Awards and was nominated for Project of the Year at the Scots Language Awards. Grace is now touring the work across Scotland with a four-woman ensemble and evocative film by Michiel Turner, sharing the voices and experiences of this fishing community and championing its grassroots poetry, speech and heritage.