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