It’s not down on any map or chart: true places never are.

The northern waters meet at the Brough of Birsay off the mainland of Orkney in one fixed ripple, a constant fold, a fault line where the Atlantic becomes the North Sea. This scarcely visible join is the axis of the northern waters of Europe. This place came strongly to my mind, thinking about the Scottish artist and curator Pat Law, a navigator through remote Scottish waters, a northern and arctic traveller. She makes works about place, the north, and the shores of the northern seas. Some of these are graphic, drawings sometimes made of the substance of the north itself: lava dust and glacier water. In one work, these are combined into an evocative, schematic drawing of a lava cave offering the only respite from the blizzard which obliterates the rest of the paper with white. She also gathers collaborators to join her collections and curated works online – variations on themes, executed in diverse media – and the constant focus of these works is the north, especially its shores and seas1. This is a heartening contemporary manifestation of an old, lived geography which transcends national boundaries. The sea unites us, never divides us. A paradox and a truth: the waters of the northern seas were, and are, a well-travelled and ancient highway linking the lands which border its shores with centuries of shared culture, language, experience and knowledge. And the northern waters which are Pat Law’s medium and subject have their meridian in the ripple at the Brough of Birsay.

There is a sixteenth-century map in the Royal Library at The Hague which expresses this exactly. Rather than showing that kind of geography which is an unreflecting scale-model of reality, it shows the geography of daily experience. The North Sea is represented as a disc, almost completely surrounded by land, with the names of all the fishing and trading ports prominently marked. And the water at the centre is full of ships under sail, linking the harbour towns, connecting the shores.

A different dimension of the imagination of the north is illustrated by the maps in the early-sixteenth-century editions of the Cosmology of Ptolemy. There, in the waters between Scotland and Iceland, Orkney and Shetland share the seaway with the Islands of the Blessed, while the great Sea of Ice begins just on the far side of Iceland. This gives visible form to a sense that the north is a region which includes places of unearthly wonder, places which partake of the nature both of this world and of an otherworld, places which can, most often, only be reached by sea. Or they can be glimpsed, unreachable, on the other side of darkened water on which ice is already forming.

The sea explains so much to us. Last summer, I was sailing north out of Whitehills on the northern coast of Aberdeenshire, on a friend’s wooden boat. It was a flawless high summer day, with the hills of Sutherland – which name itself is the old ‘South Land’ of the Scandinavians – clear on the northern horizon. I asked the experienced man who was steering the boat how long it would take us to get to Bergen. On that bright day, on that quiet sea, any journey seemed possible. He said that it wouldn’t take long at all: a day or two if all went well.

This brought into focus for me the reality of the northern seas as a highway, as the medium which brings Scotland so close to the Netherlands, to Iceland and Scandinavia, linking these countries into a complex of relations so intense and so ancient that we might justly think of all our shorelines as a single environment, with a shared seagoing history. Beyond this, the northern shores are all sharers to some degree of an identity: countries which can be described as ‘the northlands’. As the north is perceived (from inside, from outside) the northern sea and the northern light (present and absent) are constants of the environment. Light and darkness over northern coasts, islands in mist, sea-caves in the rain, the masthead light reflected in dark water.

There are elements of a shared northness which are casual: birch trees in snow in the three o’clock evenings of winter, the cobalt twilight lingering over the water in summer. There are deeper elements which are historical and environmental: habits of agriculture and seafaring enforced by climate. Northern architectural heritages have deep and subtle links at all levels: the towers and roofs of Stockholm or Copenhagen are so like the old representations of the skyline of Aberdeen when it still had its gilded spheres and onion domes as well as its crown spire. The interiors of many old Scottish houses have painted panelling made of Scandinavian timber, and the blue or manganese tiles of the Netherlands around their hearths. The paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, those interiors of Copenhagen apartments painted by the slowly fading light of winter afternoons, resonate to an extraordinary degree with the nocturnes and shadow-rooms of the Scottish painters of the turn of the twentieth century.

When I lived in the Netherlands, I used to reflect almost every day that the Town Hall in Leiden, a magnificent building taking up a whole block of the main street, must have been built substantially of stone shipped over from the east coast of Scotland, a vast number of ships, each carrying its load of stone as ballast. When I returned to Scotland after that, I began to see that there were buildings, especially in the coastal towns in Fife, which must have been built by Dutch architects, or architects who had spent time in Holland: the church at Burntisland, the Town House at Crail. The connections multiply: a lifetime could be spent, and not without profit and delight, in tracing them without ever coming to an end.

And remember the passengers on those ships which crossed and re-crossed northern waters through the centuries. Those passengers carried the most vital cargo of all: ideas, technologies and information. The northmen of Denmark brought into Scotland intricate skills in sculpture and shipcraft. The clergy of the great Norwegian cathedral of Nidaros in the early Middle Ages travelled southwards to administer their daughter dioceses in the Northern and Western Isles. The Shetland woodcarver Andrew Smith crossed the northern sea to carve the great pulpit and grave monuments in the cathedral at Stavanger. Many journeymen painters whose names are now lost to us travelled between all the countries around the North Sea, giving to all of them an inheritance of related and yet subtly differenced traditions in decorative painting. The sea roads connect the painted beams of a Scottish Renaissance ceiling with the painted woodwork of a country church on the western shores of Norway, and the ‘rose-painting’ in the wooden farmhouses of Telemark. The icy perfections of the Cathedral Square in Copenhagen have their counterpart in the wintery, hermetic elegance of Cairness House in Buchan. Traditions of vernacular violin-playing stretch across the seas, from Scotland to Friesland, and round Scandinavia and back. One of the most perfect of Robert Burns’s songs – ‘The Gallant Weaver’ – is made to a Scandinavian tune.

Movements of ideas and energies around the northern waters have always been circular, mutual exchanges. Thousands of Scots received their higher educations in medicine and justice in the universities of the Netherlands over the centuries. There was a stable colony of Aberdeen merchants at Danzig. Shared traditions of architecture unite the northern classicism of Stockholm or Edinburgh with the wooden triglyphs of the oxide-red farmhouse by the Tromsø fjord, the guttae shaped from birch twigs with two knife-cuts. I saw this northernmost work of vernacular classicism in late May, when the treeless shores were brilliant in summer light. I tried then to imagine the winter isolation of this substantial red-painted farmhouse on the sloping fields beside the water. A white fence encloses a sort of garden of a few birch trees in front. Logs are laid into the shingle of the beach, in front of the house: rollers for pulling the boat in. A little stone jetty in still water: water like pewter, extraordinary water.

There were more connections to be seen in the traditional clothes in the shops near Tromsø cathedral. The local ones are particularly fine: for the woman, a red bodice and black apron outlined with bold stripes of white, making a plaid pattern at the corners. The man’s clothes are the dress of a well-doing yeoman farmer of the opening years of the nineteenth century: short grey jacket and breeches, neckerchief, striped, double-breasted waistcoat. Precisely Robert Burns’s clothes in the miniature in the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

From a later time, there were those educated travellers who went north from Britain, almost in a spirit of pilgrimage, to Iceland as to the cradle of democracy itself. Others went to find consolation in the still air of the mountains and the forests along the remoter shores of the North Sea. These were the nineteenth-century versions of the old connections made by the ship-routes which cross and re-cross the north seas, those ancient and ever-renewed patterns which shaped and shape the north.

Apart from the great Roman trunk routes fixed in the first millennium, routes which – significantly – barely extend north of the Forth, the geography of roads in Britain is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The real geography of influence and affinity in northern Europe travels by the sea-roads. Pat Law evokes this in the images which she places at the cores of her curated work Seven Short Sails:

Positive and negative, brightening mornings set against the darker aspects of northern voyages, uncontrollable weather and winter. These forces are manifested in the work in boats that never come to harbour; drawings for sculptural structures which have aspects of both haven and fortification; an elegy for Eric Ravilious, the war artist lost in a September storm off Iceland; the smoothed reaches of the Icelandic shore, waves stirring and heaving; fragile talismans of the far north held in cupped hands – a gull’s egg, fluorspar; clouded water, rusted tin, the memorial of explorers lost on the search for the North-West Passage.

A fantastical aspect of the north is also part of this work: a dream-song about the beginnings of things; a shadow-guardian patrolling the shore between high and low water; a wonder-tale about a dragon in an ice-cave; the frosted bare branches of a tree, hung with geometrical figures and winter suns; a jewel bristling like an insect’s eye with circuits and electrical elements; a great steel mask in an empty industrial building in northern Sweden, like a giant version of the speaking bronze head of legend; sounds of wind and ice-crack at the far reaches of the world.

Landfall, the seven works which constitute the final stage of Pat Law’s Seven Short Sails project, is an amplification of the territory defined at the outset. We return to the noise of the sea; to gently moving images of cobalt-blue waters (the colour of the last summer evening sky has come down into the water); to a boy riding his bicycle on the cliffs of Shetland; to delicate watercolour patterns of shoreline and sand; to ink clouds over a level beach; to cloud in profundity of water; to the saddest memory-place of the far north, the Terror camp: the traces of Franklin’s vanished, poisoned expedition.

There are many felicitous echoes and counterpoints along the way. Silent fog on still deep water at the outset; a boat outlined against dark grey and against clouded grey; an explosion of gulls in sea mist and spray. Echoes and chains follow from this: reddened waves under a white sky are transformed into a photograph of the white Mer de Glace with a climber in red, echoing across to memories of Ravilious as painter of the northern waters whose fascination with ice and the shores of the north began with the eighteenth-century painter Francis Towne’s renderings of the Mer de Glace in the Alps.

Writing this, I remember a chance meeting with Ravilious’s daughter at the house of friends in London. A handsome and kindly woman in her sixties, with her father’s eyes. All the years I have been writing about Ravilious 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.

There are moments in Pat Law’s work which bring out the intrinsic poetry and melancholy of navigation. All departures, all lit craft moving away to the north and the open sea. The masthead light against the darkened sky. Boat and landing lights fading out with dawn, fading in with nightfall. By contrast, there are moments of sunlight and morning wind, tight-bunched thrift underfoot as the coastal grassland gives way to sand: a beached boat is brought back into summer use and is rowed out into the clear waters off the island.

The short northern summer whose days are mostly lived in memory: shadows in shallow, sunlit water – a woman cycling, then children leaping, then the cyclist’s shadow again. Generations watching each other grow, childhood memory passed down.

But there are also absences and memorials. Rain at the window of the harbour-side bar, evening coming on slowly, the water darkening by degrees below the darkening sky, until sky and water and rain on the window turn to one deep blue. Like sitting drinking coffee in the Harbour Bar at Pittenweem long after the minimalist lunch which they used to offer there twenty years ago. Just baked prawns in a dish, a chewy Lowland roll. While the rain ran down the window, fell on the red furrows and stone field-walls behind the town, fell invisibly into the waters out beyond the Isle of May. The leading lights at the mouth of the harbour would come on in the abandoned afternoon, marking the slowed, slowing passage of time, green and red, red and green. Green, red. The last colour leaching out of the southern sky behind them and the rain rougher on the window on the evening wind, until the lights are reflected in black water and still no boat comes into view.

The imaginary, believed geography of the mediaeval north encompassed bridges between the known world and territories of the otherworld. The Islands of the Blessed in the waters between Shetland and Iceland, the shadow-land of dying giants beyond the frozen sea. These places which I have listed are at once worldly and otherworldly, imaginary and real, imaginative projections of real journeys. And so this sequence, rooted in places of northern memory, comes to define or encompass an intensely shared imagination of the north and the northern

1 Much of this work can be found at www.studiolog.heriot-toun.co.uk.

2 Pat Law, Seven Short Sails, www.studiolog.heriot-toun.co.uk/7sails/7sails.php.