This book was begun snowbound at midwinter and finished in the long green evenings of a rainy summer. It began with a search through the miscellaneous pocket notebooks of thirty years for those half pages and flyleaves where I’d jotted down notations of the fall of light on a particular day, of words spoken or overheard that had seemed worth recording. Many of these notations are about places – if I could draw they might have been sketches. As I gathered them together, a common intention began to emerge, an attempt to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever, joined with a growing awareness of the paradoxes that surround that loss and preservation.

I also came to see patterns of interest that had remained constant for thirty years and more: in the distinctiveness of places, in gardens and rooms as extensions (or memorials) of their inhabitants. In the variety of ways of looking at landscape and townscape, particularly in the quotidian records made by regional painters all over Europe in the earlier nineteenth century. This particular interest focuses on the Norwich painter John Sell Cotman, on his daily topographical work and on his unconventional records of wild and deserted grounds. An early and lasting fascination has been with what might be called cultural persistence – in modes of speech, in the shops of old-fashioned bakers and ironmongers, in the political and religious differences of the dissident corners of upland Britain. Perspectives and geographies have always been subjects of interest, especially unconventional perspectives – Britain viewed from the sea roads of the old north, which draw Edinburgh closer to Rotterdam than to London, which position the northernmost shires of Scotland in their ancient alignment as the south land of the Scandinavian north. Partly on account of the past of my own family, I am fascinated by that shadowy Britain which is recollected from exile in Europe; as by the Scottish or English islands within the continent – colleges in Rome, communities of wine shippers in Jerez or Cádiz. This double focus leads to an awareness of all those complex aesthetic phenomena over the centuries which could be summarised as attempts to recreate the south in the north: painted rooms, triumphal arches in rainy parks. But the most constant factor of all has been a lifelong attentiveness to place, and to the change and flux of light and season, especially, but not exclusively, in the north.

There is a verse by Michael Riviere, commemorating three beautiful women on grey horses riding through the sunlight of ‘an October … many years ago’, and lamenting the absence of a painter to capture that instant,

This book is a set of memorials and notations, of attempts to frame moments from recollected time, ‘out of time’.

My student years were spent travelling between Scotland and England. Therefore, they were spent in a fruitful tension between the sort of landscape in which I now live – coastal farmland within sight of the high hills – and the levels and willows of East Anglia. Remembering an essence of England when in Scotland: the Yorkshire towns on the Great North Road, sidelong sunlight of the first week of October falling across laid brick through prisms of blue air, the George Inn at Easingwold. Memories now locked into Ackermann prints, into English provincial music of the eighteenth century, Avison and Shield.

Two vignettes summarise the England which I inhabited in my student days. A summer day of drenching, obliterating rain, driving with a Kentish friend to East Sutton Park to transcribe the Filmer family epitaphs in the church. The hammering storm on the leads of the roof. We drove back up an overshadowed lane, dimmed further by the rain, against a silvery, failing light. A place and season for a haunting, said my friend, as if there had been a hunting accident long ago, and we might come at any corner upon shuffling men carrying the broken body of the squire’s only son.

And one Sunday evening in Cambridge, another friend rang asking if he could come and sing. Summer vacation, the town quiet, almost deserted. A lamp on the fortepiano. Purcell and Thomas Campion. The Purcell ‘Evening Hymn’ is extraordinary, sung quietly in a lamplit attic room like that, with the river at the end of the garden reflecting the streetlamps on the other side, and with nobody to hear it.

In England I would remember the east coast of Scotland, days like the day of an autumn visit with my father to Foulis Easter near Dundee. It grew mistier as the afternoon wore on. The village has a fine site on a roll of red-earthed upland with a view down to the Tay. There was a good decrepit tower house, inhabited as tenements, and beside it, a steep valley with a burn. The church was dank and unremarkable, but we got in to see the sixteenth-century paintings: the Crucifixion, a jester in the crowd at the foot of the cross; Our Lord on the rainbow, coming to judgement, the paint almost worn away. These have the faded remnant of a great, crude force, but the real wonder is their surviving at all. The north bank of the Tay is more of a dark corner than people think. We returned the key, with thick mist rising off the ploughed fields, passing a handsome young man who was kicking a football against the castle wall by the church. There was only one name on the war memorial, Captain the Master of Kinnaird.

That cold afternoon echoes across thirty years to a recent visit to the painted chapel at the top of the steep bank at Gwydir, and to the castle in the river valley below, with its austere, almost-empty rooms, dark and still and rich and splendid. A verdure tapestry, an oak coffer, a portrait. A great wood fire smouldering on its archaeology of ash. A fine view across a dark room through leaded windows to a sunlit garden, with an alley of great topiary yews and the spray of a fountain flashing its brilliants in distant sunlight. The master of the house appeared in pale trousers and a blue-striped shirt, deftly rescued a swallow from the upper hall, and steered it to an open window. He offered an urbane ‘Good afternoon’ and vanished into the shadows of his wonderful home, not through any visible or obvious door. And the woodsmoke under the hanging woods and the strangeness of the beauty created by the backwoods princes who built that house.

As strange as a moment of a spring evening in Florence, walking back on Shrove Tuesday from dinner in the Borgo Santa Croce. An apparition of three genuinely elegant and sinister maskers for the Carnival, slender young men in black suits with beautifully made beast masks, like the head of the beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. In an instant, they vanished into the mild night and the darkened basement bars.

This moment finding its echo eight years later in an apparition and vanishing in arctic Finland – but this was a moment which was an enigma of the light, as that had been of the darkness. Oulu in high summer, wooden houses on islands, birch trees, the Baltic lapping at beaches of dark pebbles, the smell of flowering rowans and Stockholm tar. Bright water at the end of every lane. My friend had talked, as we strolled through the wood, about the sea frozen at midwinter and walking out to the islands. Further north you could drive on it, hike or drive to Sweden. We came suddenly onto 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.

The very act of setting these days down is an attempt to frame them ‘out of time’, a parallel similitude to that offered by the painters of daily life. In painting, the apparent preservation of the instant seems (but only seems) to defeat time itself. Thus a painter in the early modern Netherlands apparently captures forever the likeness of a shabby horseman, as he turns in his saddle in a hollow between the sand dunes of the Dutch coast in the falling light of an early autumn evening in the 1640s. His momentary gesture could still be seen on the wall of the gallery at Haarlem, and time itself seems set at defiance by the depiction of the moment.2 Of course it is an illusion of an illusion, manufactured in many hours in the studio.

This illusion of the capture of the moment, lost and yet preserved forever, is the purpose of this book, a late, prose echo of the haunting painted similitudes of the minor Dutch or Norwich painters. We can still see the extended hand of the shabby rider, as I can try to notate these long green and grey evenings in a remote house, the light dimming imperceptibly in the shadow of old trees at the top of an overcast, stillborn summer, now going over into August.

The southern sky changed from overshadowed grey to cobalt half an hour ago, and the moon is rising while, to the north, the horizon still shows rags of cold azure behind the larch trees. But as I write, light and time and summer are unstill, and the instant has passed into memory even as it is described.

1 Michael Riviere, ‘Rippon’, Selected Poems (South Burlingham: Mandeville Press, 1999), f.10v.

2 This rider in a landscape is a haunting memory of a painting of the school of Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) seen when it was on loan to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem in 1991. It is one of a tightly related group of paintings by Wouwerman and his studio, including The Grey in the Rijksmuseum, Horse and Dismounted Rider in Leipzig, and, especially, Rider’s Resting Place in Antwerp, all of which show ragged horsemen in landscapes, mostly those formed by the sand dunes of the west coast of the Netherlands. They seem to capture the shuffling homeward travel of a defeated and broken cavalry: the lower ranks of the Eighty Years’ War seen from far behind the lines.