The Caledonian Antisyzygy

duncan macmillan

The Caledonian antisyzygy is a term invented to describe the supposed harnessing of conflicting opposites under the common yoke of the Scottish character. It is a trope of Scottish literature defined by James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Perhaps it goes even deeper than that however, and this antisyzygy is actually rooted in the Scottish landscape itself. There is hardly a piece of fertile land in Scotland where, as you look at it, you are not aware at the same time of the wild hills beyond or around it. Nor are they just a backdrop; like the antisyzygy, they are an integral but starkly contrasting aspect of the same landscape. Away from the wilder mountains where there is no cultivation, in both the Highlands and the Lowlands it is this relationship of green fields and wild hills that form s the distinctive Scottish landscape. Although very different, they belong together, for it is the shelter given by the high ground that makes possible the fertility of the fields of the low ground.

Nor need the hills be mountains. The Lammermuirs that shelter the fields of East Lothian on one side and of Berwickshire on the other rise to no more than seventeen hundred feet. You can go from fertile field to wild hill in no time at all, but because Scotland’s climate exists on a knife edge, as you climb you go from temperate low ground to near sub-Arctic high ground. There can be snow on the Lammermuirs any time between September and May but all within sight of some of the most fertile land in the country. To touch on this contrast, Sir Walter Scott called his darkest and most romantic novel The Bride of Lammermoor and through Lucia di Lammermoor Donizetti’s operatic rendering of Scott’s story, the name of the hills has become universally familiar. In her remarkable pictures Barbara Rae has explored this land of contrasts and has found there a drama of similar mood to that explored by Scott.

Under the restrictions of the pandemic of 2020–22, Barbara Rae couldn’t travel to the Arctic as she had done in several previous years, so she made what was perhaps an instinctive choice, and turned to paint the Lammermuirs in winter. Indeed, you could almost say she turned to the Arctic close at hand. Certainly, as she did in the Arctic, she found a world that was not monochrome as might be expected in winter hills, but one that is full of colour. Her pictures certainly represent winter, but if their key is turned up to give them force, these colours are there in the landscape in that season all the same. Andrew MacIntosh Patrick once told me how his father, the Scottish landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick, was wont to say: ‘I canny paint summer. There’s nae colour.’ Where the light is so soft that there are scarcely shadows, every shade and nuance of colour can sing as it does in these pictures.

What is also constantly reflected in them , however is how, unlike most of the high mountain wildernesses of conventional Scottish iconography, these hills, though apparently barren, are a palimpsest; they are layered in history laid down by millennia of human presence. They have also provided grazing for animals over all that time – their name probably derives from old Scots meaning lambs’ moor or hill. Sheep still graze them, wandering as they do so among Neolithic and B ronze A ge monuments, Iron Age settlements, ancient forts and even at the eastern end of the range, almost uniquely in southern Scotland, a broch. The ancient kingdom of Lothian, its name preserved in the county names East, West and Mid-Lothian, lay between the Forth and Tweed rivers. The Lammermuirs lay across the middle of the kingdom, but, steep and severe as they undoubtedly are, they seem never to have been a barrier either to its people or to their successors. The hills are crisscrossed with paths from all ages. Carrying their fish to market in Lauder, fishwives from Dunbar, for instance, used to walk the length of them, their laden creels on their backs and the tracks they left are still known as the Herring Road. Throughout their extent, the hills are marked by the lines of these and other ancient tracks, by enclosures, d y kes and ditches, sheep folds, patches of burnt heather, plantations, marginal fields won painfully from the bare hillside, their shelter belts of windblown trees and a more recent arrival, the spiky profiles of wind farms. All these things are like drawing on the hills themselves and that is how they are reflected in the graphic patterns the artist deploys in her pictures. The boundaries where the patchwork of fields gives way to the hill also frequently draw a second horizon below the natural one of the crest of the hills.

As it cuts across the picture, this second horizon divides it into three zones: sky, hill and cultivation. Barbara Rae’s big picture Cranshaws is a superb example of this pattern. There is a black sky, the curved profile of a hill and, beneath, the more richly coloured, geometrical pattern of fields. With the dark above, and light and colour below, this picture and others like the Moor Gate diptych, or Green Moor Gate and also smaller pictures such as Dark Plantation or Winter – Penshiel all illustrate magnificently this landscape’s antisyzygy.

For all these traces of human activity, however, the Lammermuirs have kept their wild integrity. To avoid the barrier they present, the railway and the main road south from Edinburgh actually set out due east for the first 25 miles of their journey and only turn south when they reach the sea to skirt the eastern end of the hills along the coast. Their passage is so restricted between hills and sea that for a time the railway runs along the cliffs and passengers look down at the waves breaking on the rocks far below.

There is only one narrow pass that goes through the Lammermuirs. Its entrance from the north is still protected by the Iron A ge ramparts of Whitecastle hill fort as the road leads up the Whiteadder Water to cross the watershed and then carry on down through Longformacus into Berwickshire. Only the Romans ever drove a road directly across these hills: Dere Street rises to 1 200 feet at Soutra Hill making it a serious mountain pass in winter. Indeed , though little now remains of it, throughout the M iddle A ges there was a monastic hospital there as a refuge for travellers. Now the A68, the road has been in use ever since Roman times. Around AD 600, the warriors of the Gododdin, or to the Romans the Votadini – the people of Lothian who gave Edinburgh its name and whose strongholds included Edinburgh Castle and Traprain Law – marched along it to catastrophic defeat by the Saxons at the Battle of Catterick. This critical event, which opened southern Scotland to invaders from Northumberland, is recorded in the eponymous Welsh poem The

Gododdin’ which also contains the only contemporary reference to a warrior called Arthur. (Like Welsh, the language of southern Scotland was Brittonic and so the poem has been preserved in Wales.) There are certainly ghosts in these hills. We feel their presence here.

William Gillies was among the first seriously to explore this landscape as a subject for painting. He was principal of Edinburgh College of Art when Barbara Rae was a student there, but as principal he was no longer teaching and she dismisses any link. She has nevertheless stuck to something to which Gillies also subscribed and which has for long been definitive of Scottish art , whether in Edinburgh or in Glasgow where she taught at the School of Art for many years: that art is rooted in experience. Even further from Gillies’s example, however, like her older contemporary John Houston, or indeed Joan Eardley before him, she has taken on the new freedom seized for painting by the A bstract E xpressionist artists of the postwar years, both European and American, and brought it to inform her account of the actual landscape. Loyal to the idea of an art based in experience, she pulls the abstract back to the actual to endow her images of this rich and fascinating landscape with vivid energy. Although her pictures were done in the studio, they are based on direct observation recorded in her remarkable sketchbooks . They reflect the real world swiftly and directly apprehended. The finished work is manifestly still an emotional response to the actual, but in its rapidity it also sets up another counterpoint. At one and the same time her glance takes in both the momentary movements of light and shade and the immemorial. When she raises her eyes to take in the wide expanse of the hills beneath the winter sun, we see the agelessness of their geology But we also see the presence of people over countless generations marked so strikingly on the landscape and with it the rhythms of the days and of the seasons indeed, the march of time itself.