Notes from the book:

To be danced with “braggart in your step”.

The name of the dance is taken from the song “The Road to the Isles”, written for a tune that was collected on the Hebridean island of Barra:

*Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go,*  
*By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles*  
*If it's thinkin' in your inner heart the braggart's in my step,*  
*You've never smelled the tangle o' the Isles.*

The dance is a memento of a survey of “tangle” (seaweed) ecology undertaken long ago in the tide race along the Loch Obe gorge on Barra’s east coast. All dancers move ceaselessly throughout, simulating perpetual swirling of tangle fronds in the turbulence of tide and wave. Bars 1-8 represent movement of tangle fronds during the ebb and flow of the tide; in 9-16 they swirl away and back again as waves surge and recede; in 17-24 they are in a whirlpool with marginal eddies and in 25-32 they are displaced by turbulence and rotate in new locations, awaiting the next tide.