Amy Liptrot: ‘I swam in the cold ocean and dyed my hair a furious blue… I was moving upwards slowly’

Growing up in remote Orkney Amy Liptrot couldn't wait to get away. But after 10 years in London, unhappy and drinking too much, she finally got sober and 'washed up' on her home island. It was the best thing she could have done"

" Read an extract from The Outrun here

Last month, I was back on the farm where I grew up in Orkney, out on a cliffside field. I was repairing a section of dyke (as we in Orkney call drystone walls), regularly stopping to watch gannets dive like arrows into the Atlantic, smoke roll-ups and glance at my phone. I realised I was in the same place I was in four years ago, at the time I began writing The Outrun - repairing a wall on the same field at midwinter. Then, as well as building a dyke, I was figuring out a life without alcohol. This time, I'm putting myself back together after the end of a relationship, but have been sober for almost five years rather than less than one and have a book about to be published. A lot stays the same, however: the wind blows off the sea, Dad's Clydesdale stallion wanders over, the sun travels its short southern arc. I build until around 3.30, when it gets too dark to see the stones.

A dyke is actually two walls, built from local rocks - the grey flagstone that edges the farm breaks into slabs - to be flat on the outer faces, joined at the top by large linking stones and filled in the middle with smaller loose ones. It is irresistible to find parallels between wall building and writing. It's a creative process. I have to constantly visualise and discriminate, selecting the odd-shaped stones for height and shape to make a 3D jigsaw puzzle. In work gloves and woollen hat, I'm picking stones from the pile and I can't be slowed by perfectionism, I just have to get on with laying the stones, using the materials I have. It's slow work but I'm building something that will last, using an ancient practice and linking myself steadily to the land.