Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  The artist Eric Ravilious ‘noticed everything’, Davidson writes. The same might be said of him. Ravilious saw ‘the gradations of rust and soot on a tar-engine put away for the winter’. Davidson notices the ‘[f]ine gradations’ that:

  mark this turn of the year to spring: the glass of the lake rising a little with the snow melt; steel drifts of ice on water like mercury. The first wood-anemones on the scrubbed table which runs the length of the room.

  The ‘rising’ ‘glass’ of the lake suggests first a thermometric change, the temperature-creep of the coming spring; but it is also – and foremost – ‘glass’ as water-surface, rising in level as the snow-melt joins the winter water. ‘Mercury’ draws us back into the thermometer, but is at once an image of the ice’s hard silver gleam. The intricacy of language here is a version of the intricacy of the handover of winter to spring – overlapped and shifting. Such careful slivering-out – the ability to discriminate without finicking – is one of the signatures of Davidson’s style and sensibility. It results in a lyricism as delicate in its structures as an ash-frail. He is, like Lopez, a connoisseur of degrees; but like Lopez he also acknowledges those aspects of landscape that refuse such slivering-out – those infinitely subdivisible increments of change, such that one cannot say when a day becomes dark, only that it is so.

  ~

  One August I visited Davidson at his high-halled, white-walled, hunkered-down house in a wooded fold of valley near the Aberdonian town of Turriff. After we had eaten, he took me up to a south-facing room that was thick with summer light, and there he opened the two pale-blue doors of a large wooden cabinet that stood against the back wall. It was, he explained, a cabinet of curiosities of his own devising, in homage to the great Wunderkammern or ‘wonder-rooms’ of the Renaissance and the Baroque, in which examples of natural history (naturalia), precious artefacts (arteficialia), scientific instruments (scientifica), findings from distant realms (exotica) and items of inexplicable origin and form (mirabilia) were gathered and displayed.

  He reached into the cabinet and retrieved object after object, explaining to me the skein of stories that each drew behind it. For the individual compartments of the cabinet held remarkable things, among them a little dog modelled in unfired clay, Babylonian in origin; a sixteenth-century armourer’s trial piece of a long face framed by a helmet in the form of a wolf’s head with open jaws; an engraved brass box of seventeenth-century Low Countries manufacture, which once held one of the straws on which fell drops of the blood of the Jesuit Henry Garnet, executed in London on 3 May 1606, bloodstains which were said to have formed a likeness of his face; a slice of marble from a quarry near Bristol, in which the veinery had, by geological chance, formed into a perfect facsimile of a sad Victorian landscape of misty ploughlands at evening; and the oval case of an original Claude glass, the small, blackened pocket mirror designed to reproduce in its reflection of any landscape the softened tones and single focal point characteristic of the art of Claude Lorrain.

  As the day dimmed, Peter spoke of these objects with a loving care and a sadness. His preoccupation with the Wunderkammer was, I saw that afternoon, temperamental as well as art-historical, and indeed his essays and poems often themselves resemble these curatorial cabinets – rich with discrete images but shot through with sadness (for the fragment always grieves for its whole).

  Davidson’s writing often aspires ‘to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever’. His sentences devote themselves to the record of volatile subjects – textures of weather, tones of colour, a fall of light ‘which dies even as the hand attempts to catch its likeness’ – but they do so in foreknowledge of the failure of their task. The relationship between the fixed and the fugitive is at the heart of his work, and at the source of its melancholy. The inestimable value of the instant is proved by its perishability. The paragraphs of his essays, the verses of his poems: these act as what Thomas Browne in Urne-Buriall – his great 1658 meditation on corruption, pristination and retrieval – beautifully calls a ‘conservatorie’. Yet none of these ‘conservatories’ is quite reliable, none fully sealed. All leak a little light. All are vulnerable to what Davidson calls ‘the predatory loss that shadows all human pleasure’. Walking the coast of Arctic Finland in summer, he comes upon a cove:

  basalt rocks bordering the Baltic, with the dazzling track of the sun coming straight through the sandbar which sheltered the bay. A young man was swimming there, quietly and alone, swimming breaststroke with barely a ripple – until he moved out of the shadowed waters and his tow-fair head vanished in an instant into the brilliance of the high sun on the sea.

  Here, the completion of the scene is also its annihilation: the swimmer cannot stay still, however tranquil his motion, and must move on from the shadows and into the irradiating ‘high sun’, which both illuminates and abolishes him.

  Yes, melancholy steeps Davidson’s language, and melancholy differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer lasting, is lived with rather than died of. We might perhaps imagine melancholy hydrologically, as a kind of groundwater – seeping darkly onwards, occasionally surfacing as depression or anguish. It is clear, reading Davidson’s work, that he is someone for whom melancholy has been an enduring companion. When in an essay he writes that a ‘black dog flickers in and out of the shadows at the edge of the lawns’, this is at once a Labrador and a metaphor. His writing has the power to strike its readers with sorrow also, which is among the reasons why, although his essays often emerge out of the impulse to account for art, they are art themselves.

  ‘We have gathered things about us which are of the place where we live,’ Davidson remarks of the contents of his house and its garden. So many images in his work are of ‘gatherings’: gatherings of people who must perforce disperse, the gathering up of last things, lost things, late lustres. The ‘moony silver’ of a ‘double-handed silver cup’ on a table ‘gathers the reflections of the garden and the summer and the bright sky into itself’. A bend in the stream ‘breaks forward into the sunlight and the water draws the light into itself’. High tarns among peat and bracken ‘hold the dimming sky’, ‘last light hangs reflected in mirrors inside the house’, a ‘pale yacht steers through the long dusk to far islands in the archipelago’. The act of ‘gleaning’ (a word which carries a shimmer of gleaming) occurs often in his writing – a fossicking after items of value, a gathering that is both a refusal of time’s claims and a dark counting of losses.

  Davidson’s relationship with loss also explains the what-ifs, the returns-from-the-dead and the hypothetical dreams that recur in his essays and poems. One of these, the finest of them, concerns Eric Ravilious, who disappeared in 1942 off the coast of Iceland while flying a search-and-rescue mission for another downed plane. Radar ceased to register the plane’s presence, radio contact was lost, and no trace was ever found of craft or crew. ‘All the years I have been writing about Ravilious,’ Davidson recalls in a late essay:

  I have occasionally dreamed about him: that he will come into the cold hall of a house which does not exist, a house smelling of coal fires; that he will begin to talk at once, shaking the Arctic Ocean off his dark hair as if it were only rainwater after all, as if he had been caught in the storm on a headland, benighted, laughing, painting out of doors.

  Optical physics refers to a phenomenon known as the ‘duct’. A duct is an atmospheric structure, born of a thermal inversion, which takes the form of a channel that traps light rays within a few minutes of the arc of the astronomical horizon. Because the curvature performed within a thermal inversion is stronger than the curvature of the earth’s surface, light rays can be continuously guided along the duct, following the earth’s own curvature, without ever diffusing up into space. In theory, therefore, if your eyes were strong enough to see that far, a duct would allow you to gaze around the whole earth and witness your own back and shoulders turned towards you. The existence of ducts has been theorized since the eigh
teenth century, but their science became more fully understood during the Second World War, when radar operators began observing returns from objects far beyond the normal horizon-limit. I think of Davidson’s what-ifs as versions of the duct: strange spaces in which time’s claims are stilled – and through which one might see so far into the future that it becomes the past.

  ~

  Both Lopez and Davidson are north-minded – and both are topographic humanists. They see landscape not as a static diorama against which human action plays itself out, but rather as an active and shaping force in our imagination, our ethics, and our relations with each other and the world. In the work of both, place invests consciousness and geography is inseparable from morality. Throughout their writings recurs the idea that certain landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them or live within them. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a wind-blown tree: such forms can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed. ‘In a winter-hammered landscape,’ writes Lopez, ‘the light creates a feeling of compassion … it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.’ The north is, to both men, especially powerful in this regard. Its severities bring us to witness the transgression of our own limits; its austere beauties induce both modesty and heart-lift. ‘The sharpness of the morning frost had cleared the air into a magnifying lens,’ recalls Davidson of a pin-bright Cairngorm dawn. In wind-washed Arctic air that is ‘depthlessly clear’, observes Lopez, both terrain and mind stand revealed.

  Glossary VI

  Northlands

  Dusk, Dawn, Night and Light

  aurora borealis Northern Lights: the phenomenon whereby bright streamers and curtains of coloured (reddish, greenish) light dance and swirl in the atmosphere, caused by charged particles from the sun interacting with atoms of the upper atmosphere meteorological

  benighted overtaken by darkness while walking or climbing mountaineering

  blinter dazzle, but with a particular sense of cold dazzle: winter stars or ice splinters catching low midwinter sunlight Scots

  burr mistiness over and around the moon, a moon-halo East Anglia

  dark hour interval between the time of sufficient light to work or read by and the lighting of candles – therefore a time of social domestic conversation (‘We will talk that over at the dark hour’) East Anglia

  dimmity twilight Devon

  doomfire sunset-light which has the appearance of apocalypse to it (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  eawl-leet twilight, dusk (literally ‘owl-light’) north Lancashire

  faoilleach last three weeks of winter and first three weeks of spring Gaelic

  fireflacht lightning without thunder; a flash of light which is seen in the sky, near the horizon, on autumn nights Shetland

  glouse strong gleam of heat from sunshine East Anglia

  goldfoil fork lightning that illuminates the sky with ‘zigzag dints and creasings and networks of small many-cornered facets’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  green flash optical phenomenon occurring just after sunset or just before sunrise, in which a green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the sun’s disc optics

  grey morning twilight, early dawn Exmoor

  grey-licht dusk; shortly before dawn Galloway

  grimlins night hours around midsummer when dusk blends into dawn and it is hard to say if day is ending or beginning Orkney

  haggering distortion of objects by atmospheric refraction North Sea coast

  hjalta dance,

  simmer kloks,

  simmer ree,

  simmermal brim,

  simmermal ton,

  titbow dance different names for the peculiar dancing appearance of the light on the horizon, along the tops of the hills, which is seen in sunny summer weather Shetland

  hoarlight ‘burnished or embossed forehead of sky over the sundown, beautifully clear’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  hornlight yellowish moonlight resembling the light emitted through a lantern’s horn window (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  mathionnettes Northern Lights Jèrriais (Jersey Norman)

  mirkshut twilight Herefordshire

  pink of a candle, star, etc.: to shine with a faint or wavering light, to glimmer, to twinkle southern England

  plathadh grèine sudden temporary glimpse of the sun between passing clouds Gaelic

  shepherd’s lamp first star that rises after sunset (John Clare) Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire

  shivelights splinters of light (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  shreep of mist: to clear away partially East Anglia

  Frost and Cold

  aingealach acute numbness in great frost Gaelic

  atteri bitterly cold Shetland

  clumst benumbed with cold northern England

  crool to huddle miserably together from cold Herefordshire

  dis not able to stand cold well Gaelic

  dùbhlachd depth of winter Gaelic

  finger-cold cold that is not bitter, but enough to make the fingers tingle Kent

  fresh of weather: the breaking of a spell of frost Scots

  geal-cauld ice-cold Scots

  glince, glincey slippery, icy Kent

  haari cold that is hard and piercing Shetland

  horripilation erection of the hairs on the skin by contraction of the cutaneous muscles, often caused by cold medical

  hovvery, kivvery very shivery, numb with cold Kent

  hussy to chafe or rub the hands when they are cold Kent

  jeel frost Scots

  knit up of a bird: to fluff up feathers as a response to cold Herefordshire

  kreemee shivery with cold Exmoor

  nurped freezing Herefordshire

  peart cold Devon

  pinjy cold Galloway

  pinnish to shrink from the effect of cold Shetland

  plucky of earth: broken and rigid following a hard frost Essex

  skinner cold day North Sea coast

  stirn to tremble from the effect of cold Shetland

  wurr hoar frost Herefordshire

  yark cold; wild, stormy weather Exmoor

  Wind, Storm and Cloud

  aigrish of wind: sharp, cutting Essex

  black-east, black-easter cold, dry east wind Galloway

  blackthorn winter winter that turns very cold late in the season Herefordshire

  blae of wind: cold, cutting, harsh Galloway

  boff to blow back: used only of wind blowing smoke back down a chimney Staffordshire

  bright-borough area of the night sky thickly strewn with stars (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  bruach ring or halo around the moon, presaging unsettled weather Irish

  carry drift or movement of clouds English

  cherribim sky Anglo-Romani

  ciabhar slight breeze, just enough to stir the hair Gaelic

  dim-wood area of the night sky where few stars can be seen (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  dintless of a sky: cloudless poetic

  duvla’s pani rainbow Anglo-Romani

  eeroch pains thought to be caused by the east wind in winter Northern Ireland

  fell sudden drop in wind Galloway

  flam sudden light breeze North Sea coast

  flan sudden gust of wind Shetland

  flinchin deceitful promise of better weather Scots

  fuaradh-froise cool breeze preceding a rain-shower Gaelic

  garbhshíon unseasonably cold and windy weather Irish

  greann-gaoth piercing wind Gaelic

  gurl howl of the wind Scots

  gurley cold, threatening wind Galloway

  gussock strong and sudden gust of wind East Anglia

  hefty of weather: rough, boisterous, wild Ireland

  hot-spong sudden power of heat felt when the sun comes from under a wind-shifted cloud East Anglia

  huffling wind blowing up in sudden gusts Exmoor

  h
ulder the roar in the air after a great noise (e.g. thunder) Exmoor

  katabatic wind that blows from high ground to low ground, its force being aided by gravity; sometimes known as a ‘fall wind’ meteorological

  lambin’ storm gale which usually happens in mid March North Sea coast

  lythe calm or absence of wind Fenland

  mackerel-sky sky mottled with light, striped cirrus clouds Exmoor

  meal-drift high, wispy clouds poetic

  moor-gallop wind and rain moving across high ground Cornwall, Cumbria

  Noah’s ark cloud that widens upwards from the horizon, in the shape of an ark, and signals an approaching storm Essex

  noctilucent cloud high and rare cloud type (literally ‘night-shining’) that drifts in the upper atmosphere, is made of ice crystals and is so high as to be invisible except when, after sunset around midsummer, ‘the tilt of the earth allows it to catch the last light of the sun’ (Amy Liptrot) meteorological