Sean Cooney

It's an interesting one, really, because all these big emotional subjects I've written about over recent years, like one woman asked me to write a song about a brother who died in the Lockerbie bombing,

Another person asked me to write a song about their friend Richard Moore who was blinded as a kid during the Troubles.

These are huge subjects and take great care and delicacy as needed to tell these people's stories.

It felt different this time around writing about dogs because, I mean, in many cases with a story of tip, there's not much known.

There's a couple of newspaper cut-ins.

You know, there's legend associated with it.

So it was almost like, in many cases, like back to basics, really.

Well, we've got a story.

It's a short story because there's not many facts there.

How are we going to sort of tell it in a way that conveys, you know, the emotion of how I first felt when I read about this amazing dog?

Yeah, yeah.

As a folk singer, as we get nearer Derwent Dam, we can really hear it coming down.

It's so loud now, isn't it?

Yeah.

As a folk singer, you know, you're drawn.

what's come before, you look for folk songs about dogs, and you think, well, to honour Tip and to commemorate this story in musical form, it needs to be something that people can join in with.

Absolutely.

And hopefully give people around here something else to have to celebrate this lovely local story.

Snow on the fells.

Yeah, absolutely.