Pete Clark was standing watching sea lions in San Francisco Bay when he took a call on his mobile phone from the United Arab Emirates. A few years earlier Clark had been contacted by a retired minister in Hawick who had heard Clark talking enthusiasticall

Clark didn’t imagine that he’d ever have another chance to play this fiddle as Lindsay Thomson died about a year later, so on that morning in San Francisco he was surprised to be hearing from Thomson’s son David.

“I must have made an impression on Lindsay because his son was calling to arrange a meeting and when I suggested recording an album of Niel Gow tunes using the fiddle that Lindsay had been given by his music teacher and had once belonged to Niel Gow as a tribute to Lindsay, David immediately agreed,” says Clark. The album, Niel Gow’s Fiddle, was released in 2017 and Clark is proud to be the fiddle’ custodian still.

Clark’s championing of Niel Gow and his music over the past thirty years or more has bordered on the heroic. In 2004 his interest in Gow led to him staging a festival in and around Birnam and Dunkeld to celebrate his hero. It’s now in its 16th year and when the 17th edition of the festival takes place next year, a life-sized bronze statue of Gow by the artist David Annand will be unveiled.

“I’ve always been struck by the fact that there isn’t a major lasting memorial to Gow who, for me, is one of Scottish traditional music’s most significant figures,” says Clark. “Everywhere you go you see statues of Robert Burns, and I’ve no problem with that, but Gow’s legacy is immense. He and Burns met, of course, during Burns’ Highland tour and Burns set words to Gow’s tunes – Major Graham of Inchbrakie, for example, is believed to be the original air to My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. There’s Gow’s headstone in Little Dunkeld kirk yard and there’s a plaque on the cottage where he lived in Inver, if you know where to look for it. More recently there’s been the carved bench under Niel Gow’s tree on the banks of the Tay but that’s about a mile upriver from Dunkeld, and even just from a cultural tourism point of view we could be doing more to raise awareness in him.”

Clark first became smitten by Gow’s music as a teenager. He grew up in Dunfermline and one night he heard Davie Lockhart of the Fife group Heritage playing a melody that grabbed him instantly. On asking what this tune was called he was told it was Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of His Second Wife, an air that could almost be Gow’s theme tune, such is its popularity among fiddler players still today.

“I went away and learned that tune and kept my ears and eyes open for more of Gow’s work,” says Clark. “It’s the emotional pull of that particular tune that stayed with me and then years later, just by chance, I ended up living in Birnam, not far from Inver, where Gow lived, and it just seemed natural to delve into the history of the area because a lot of Gow’s tunes were inspired by or dedicated to nearby places and people from roundabout. I got hooked on the man and what he’d done for Scottish fiddle music.”

Gow’s music was preserved through his son Nathaniel’s publishing of a three-volume collection, The Beauties of Niel Gow. The tunes in these books weren’t just Gow’s own. His four sons – Nathaniel, William, John and Andrew – were all fiddlers and tunesmiths and Nathaniel, who set up a publishing company in Edinburgh, was essentially documenting the repertoire that the family played “on gigs”.

“The bread and butter of what they did was dance music,” says Clark. “That’s how they made their living, mostly, and there’s a wealth of jigs, reels and strathspeys that they played for dancing. But there are also a lot of lovely slow airs, quite a lot of them, but not all, laments and this talent passed down the family. Niel Gow Junior, who was Nathaniel’s son and Niel Senior’s grandson, wrote a lovely lament for Flora Macdonald and Niel himself wrote beautiful airs that Robert Burns, as I said earlier, picked up on. Their meeting, when they spent a day at least going over tunes in Niel Gow’s cottage, would have been quite some occasion at which to be a fly on the wall.”

Clark gives a flavour of what might have happened on that day in 1787 during the illustrated walk he takes festivalgoers on each March. The couple who currently live in Gow’s cottage lay on soup and drams as the tour takes in their garden and along the route Clark plays tunes that Gow wrote for the various locations, including the Bridge of Inver and Dunkeld Hermitage Bridge.

To be playing this music on a fiddle that once belonged to the composer, as Clark will be doing once again in Little Dunkeld Church on Saturday March 16, is a privilege and no small thrill for someone so enthralled by Gow.

“I’ve played other fiddles that were Niel Gow’s, because there are several of them around, and the thing that always strikes me is how light they seem,” he says. “The one I have just now is no exception. It almost feels fragile but as soon as I draw a bow across the strings I can hear the gorgeous tone. The thing about this fiddle is that it’s the one Niel Gow treasured during the last few years of his life. It could even be the one on which he wrote his Lament for the Death of his Second Wife and to think I could be playing the tune that introduced me to Niel Gow on Niel Gow’s fiddle, with all the history associated with it, is quite a feeling.”

This sense of being “hands on” with Gow is likely to continue with David Annand’s statue.

“David’s works don’t tend to go on plinths,” says Clark. “He created the statue of Robert Fergusson outside the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh and there’s another one dedicated to another poet, William Soutar in Perth that’s easily accessible. After I saw the big fiddle that forms the memorial to the Scottish fiddler James Hill in Gateshead, I thought about having a big fiddle made for Niel Gow. But it’s more fitting to have a life-size statue that, in the age of the selfie, people can – and I’m sure they will – interact with.”

The 16th Niel Gow Festival takes place from March 15 to 17 in Birnam Arts Centre and other venues in the Dunkeld area. For full details, log onto niel-gow.co.uk.