Northern Lights

These days I head to the Med like everyone else: but it wasn’t always so. As a young man, just starting to travel under my own steam, my instinct was always to head north: to the Pennines, the Lakes, Scotland. To a soft southerner there was something compelling in these landscapes – and at that age I preferred a stiff walk in any weather to the languors of the beach. The final adventure was to take the little train north from Dingwall, across the vast peatlands of Caithness, to the end of the line in Thurso. It seemed something to stand on the very top of Britain, to peer at the distant Orkneys through a veil of rain, and to remind yourself that you were now on the same latitude as Stockholm or Juneau.

I was mostly over this northern thing by the time Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North appeared in 2005 – and yet to open its pages was to fall under an old spell. Deploying a deft blend of travelogue with cultural history, the book explores the complex meanings of ‘north’ across a range of periods and cultures. Ultimately, Davidson finds that north is less a point on the compass than a mood or state of mind. It is an aesthetic or moral orientation: one involving ideas of dearth and hardship, but also of the marvellous and strange. The northern realms will always be the proper setting for painful adventures willingly undergone, for journeys into harsh truth and purifying beauty. In quest of this idea, Davidson plunders the work of writers, artists, travellers and mythographers so that his book becomes a sort of Wunderkammer, a collection of northern wonders. He finds his prized quality of ‘northness’ in all kinds of things, from Humphrey Spender’s black-and-white photos of northern English towns in the 1930s to the beautiful Dutch winter paintings of the seventeenth century: ‘Frozen waterways, onion-domed spires . . . air as milky as ground glass with mist and approaching snow. Ice festivals and carnivals in the short light.’ The book ranges imperiously through time and space but makes no attempt to cover everything. The main focus is on Scandinavia and northern Britain – cultures and topographies in which Davidson (a Scot) clearly feels at home. There are excursions to Canada and (fascinatingly) Japan, but Russia is neglected as too vast a subject in its own right. Similarly, the great Arctic expeditions of the early twentieth century are considered only through their imaginative imprint. Davidson’s interest is always in the human, cultural north rather than the great wastes surrounding the Pole. He starts with a brisk historical survey, tracing the development of an idea or mythos of north from the (often fanciful) accounts of the first travellers. For traders, the north was a place of strange treasures, hardly won; amber, sables, the tusks of the walrus and narwhal. Their accounts speak of terrifying cold and darkness but also of wonders and prodigies: frozen seas, fiery mountains, the mysteries of the aurora and the Fata Morgana. Little wonder that the Far North was sometimes seen as the gateway to the realm of the dead. This historical section serves as a launchpad for its successor – a thrilling flight into what Davidson terms ‘Imaginations of North’. Even a bare list of the subjects covered has a shimmering, glinting, spectral quality: ice castles and sculptures, the wendigo (a sort of Arctic vampire), Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the Japanese Noh plays, Nabokov’s imagined country of Zembla (‘a distillation of Northern Europe as defined by exile, pastness and remoteness’). There is an exploration of the north in modern fantasy writing from Dino Buzzati to Phillip Pullman (‘Lyra thrilled . . . with the same deep thrill she’d felt all her life on hearing the word North’) – and a glance at the world of Victorian ghost stories, with their stealing fogs, occluded light and lonely waters. So a great deal is covered in a short space: but Davidson is quite prepared to slow down and zoom in, and it is at such moments that his always burnished prose seems to catch the light and gleam. His pages on the chandeliers of Scandinavia are characteristic in their blend of technical precision with a certain chilly splendour:

Even in the flat light of the Scandinavian autumn the chandeliers have a ghost lustre . . . the effect is not unlike walking under the branches of a frozen tree with rimy leaves and icicles holding the light . . . At midwinter, the double function of the prisms of chandeliers . . . is to cast fragments of rainbows across the room . . . An icy consolation, a diminished and domestic echo of the aurora borealis.

There is, inevitably, a whole section on north in the English imagination of the 1930s, with Auden very much the central figure. The depressed and depressing north is a classic theme of the era, but in Auden such concerns are fused with something much odder – a curious personal mythology in which northern settings serve as a testing-ground for would-be heroes:

All leave is cancelled tonight; we must say goodbye

We entrain at once for the North . . .

The world of the Norse sagas blends fantastically with that of the spy thriller or Boys’ Own adventure: and yet, as Davidson shows, the landscape remains recognizably that of the northern Pennines (with occasional hints of Scotland): Limestone moors, high fields enclosed by stone walls, lonely pubs, upland farms, isolated junction-stations . . . Chimneys in woods, cut-stone mine entrances . . . The public school in the market town under the fells . . . Shooting lodges, remote ‘sporting’ hotels. Piers, ferries, landing-stages . . . Lights reflected in water, islands of light in frosty dusk. He devotes an especially poignant chapter to ‘Northern Summer’ – and this takes us very near to the book’s heart. For Davidson, the short summer of extravagantly long evenings is a touchstone of True North, and the key to its bittersweet flavour: ‘Much of the melancholy . . . arises from the impossibility of saving one minute from the long light against the approaching darkness.’ There are radiant passages on summer in Scotland and the northern Netherlands, with references ranging from Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night to Moominpappa at Sea – where (as you may recall) the title character puts an end to the summer by carelessly lighting a lamp one evening. If a sense of transience haunts the summer from its birth, this grows ever sharper as the light begins to wane, as Tove Jansson records in her Summer Book:

One evening in August you have an errand outdoors and all of a sudden it’s pitch black . . . It is still summer but the summer is no longer alive . . . The can of paraffin is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the torch is hung up on its peg by the door . . . Things begin to shift position . . . Day by day, everything moves closer to the house.

Although Davidson reveals almost nothing about his own life, his prose takes on a peculiar intensity when dealing with known and remembered places, especially those that seem to have a personal significance. The long essay on the north of Britain that forms the book’s climax is a tour de force of the travel writer’s art. Beginning at Sheffield (‘the first northern city’), Davidson takes a meandering course through the North of England before crossing into his native Scotland. What emerges is an extraordinarily subtle sense of place, as a complex creation of geography, history and human culture. The danger of looking for a distilled essence of northness in actual northern places is that you end up with all the usual clichés about, say, Yorkshire. Davidson swerves this with aplomb, staying finely attuned to both the material facts of a place and its imaginative pen umbra. While not ducking the more obvious subjects – Durham or Edinburgh – he finds a particular delight in the out-of-the-way and the unexpected, writing beautifully, for example, on rural Lancashire – a ‘quietly archaic, secretive’ country pushed to the margins of English life by its history of stubborn Catholicism. He also penetrates that most inscrutable of English locales, the no man’s land where Cumbria meets Northumberland and the Scottish border: The village of Bewcastle feels like the last of England . . . It is impossibly alone, remote in the way that a Finnmark settlement can be remote. By the time that the road arrives at the village it has dwindled: passing through the farmyards rather than skirting them . . . There are a few houses and a church around a vast green with rough grass, grass that is almost continuous with the surrounding fell . . . When it comes to his own country, he avoids cliché by concentrating on what he terms ‘Civil Scotland’ as opposed to a Tourist Board version of the Highlands and Islands. He writes warmly about the Lothians, a pastoral country of ‘small towns by rivers’, and also Fife, ‘where the white sea-towns are folded into the breaks in the cliffs’. There are wonderful passages on the great houses of Lowland Scotland, with what seem like very personal memories of Northfield House in a spring twilight (‘The flowering trees outside in the walled garden grow immense, fill the windows, their presence stronger as the daylight fades’) and Kellie Castle at midsummer (‘Mirrors, picture glasses and chandeliers hold a pencilling of brightness at their edges. The sky outside is never quite dark . . .’). Even as he heads out for the wilds of Perthshire and Aberdeen, he observes accurately that Scotland has no equivalent to the English village – as even the smallest, most remote settlements have a flavour of the urban and the civic. For the most part, Davidson’s Scottish journey celebrates the homely and familiar and its power to hold back the cold and the dark. And yet the book ends on a wholly disquieting note, as the crying of the wild geese proclaims the advent of winter. Before this tumultuous outcry – a blast of the purest and most annihilating north – what human thing can stand?

An afternoon comes when the air fills with wingbeats and the geese dim the sky. As they land they turn the brown hill grey. Once their crying has begun, it is impossible to think of anything else . . . the rituals of home are needed in opposition to crying in the sky. Food tasting of smoke, heavy red wine, whisky: the closing of the thick curtains . . . Music fails on the night when the wild geese come. Reading is no distraction . . . Silence falls around the fire . . . Almost everything that consoles us is false.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Jonathan Law 2025