We all know the well-worn Robert Louis Stevenson quip about travelling hopefully being better than actually arriving. During the frustrations of Covid-related lockdown, Highland musician Ewen Henderson set out on journeys that didn’t arrive at all, for they were travels of the imagination, conducted via maps and books to places he either knew from previous visits or didn’t know at all but wanted to visit.

He wrote music for these whimsical wanderings then, post-lockdown, retraced his imagined steps, to physically visit the places and write further music. He may have travelled hopefully, but how did actuality match up to expectations?

“There were things that proved to be highly accurate,” says the 36-year-old fiddler, piper and singer, “other things that I was way off beam with, others that didn’t quite live up to my imaginings and others that far surpassed them.”

Steeped in Gaelic culture as a member of the renowned Lochaber Henderson family of musicians, who can trace their lineage back centuries to being pipers to the MacDonalds of Glencoe, Ewen is a founding member of folk-rockers Mànran and has also recorded and toured with the Battlefield Band and Afro-Celt Sound System, as well as writing for film and television.

He’s talking from his home in Fort William about Lèirsinn, the musical project which arose from his imagined travels and which will be performed as a centrepiece of Blas, the annual festival of Highland music and Gaelic language and culture which runs from 1-9 September.

Lèirsinn – Gaelic for perception – also formed the basis of his Masters from the University of the Highlands and Islands. Its roots, however, lie in the frustrations of lockdown, when Henderson was stuck in his Glasgow flat. “I couldn’t go anywhere, so I would immerse myself in a place for a day or two. I would get maps out and read natural and human histories of the place, just to effectively go wandering elsewhere.”

His mental roving took him to the Isle of Rum, for example, a place he’d always intended to visit more. “It was poring over a map of Rum that the idea came for a song. When I was a kid my grandmother in Mallaig had a brilliant view of the peaks of Rum, and she used to rhyme off the names of the peaks for me. Looking at the map, I started hearing the rhythm of a tune in one of the place names.”

So Òran do Rùm – “Song for Rum” – was born, the process inspiring Henderson’s thinking for the rest of the project, which also makes both imaginary and literal voyages to the Creag Meagaidh national nature reserve between Lochaber and Badenoch, to Coire Mhic Fhearchair, a spectacular natural amphitheatre on Ben Eighe, and to Coire Gabhail – the famous “Hidden Valley” of Glencoe.

The resulting music he’ll perform at Blas in the company of his sister Megan Henderson on piano, fiddle and vocals, fiddler Iain MacFarlane, multi-instrumentalist Hamish Napier, fiddler-guitarist Innes Watson and cellist Su-a Lee. The shows, in Nairn (4 September), Plockton (5th) and Newtonmore (6th), will be multimedia productions, with sets of music for both the imagined and real journeys, and with a backdrop of video footage of the locations.

Elsewhere, there is plenty going on at Blas venues across the Highlands. An opening concert in Inverness Cathedral features two brother and sister duos, Peigi and Donaidh Barker from Inverness and, from Ireland’s Connemara Gaeltacht, Séumas and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta, while other events will celebrate the birthdays of notable Highland singers and musicians Calum Martin, Rita Hunter, Murdo John Mackenzie and Dr Angus Macdonald.

To end on further, all too physical travels, another event, An Tinne, by Skye singer Anne Martin, will tell the story of one family’s forced emigration from Kilmuir to Australia in music and song composed by Gaelic, modern Australian and First Nation artists, performed by Martin with musicians including Anna Murray, Anna-Wendy Stevenson and Ingrid Henderson.

For full details of this year’s Blas programme, see www.blas.scot

Lèirsinn: Ewen Henderson’s Blas festival project inspired by the art of travelling without moving