After the storms and migrations, after the explosive roar of the armies of geese rising from the hills above the house, things fall quiet in slanting sunlight which turns pale and strengthless halfway through the afternoon. This is the final day of the truce with the cold, when the tender plants are brought in, before the last herbs and flowers in the garden soften and fail in the frosts. The washed brightness of the end of October falls on umber and viridian in the valleys, white pencilling on the high slopes above.

This is the light-drenched autumnal world of Raeburn’s portrait Sir John and Lady Clerk, now in the National Gallery in Dublin. To any eye accustomed to the northern seasons, the belated gold of this most wonderful double portrait speaks of the year irrecoverably on the turn, and the winter close at hand. It is one of the great portraits of a marriage which has lasted and deepened with time. Neither sitter is still beautiful in their person, but they are beautiful together in gesture and the mutual understanding implied by gesture. What is remarkable is that the painting manages to express the degree to which, consoled each by the other, they are indifferent to the passing days which strip the last leaves from the trees behind them, to the morning frosts beginning to whiten the northern slopes of their hills.

Raeburn also commanded a colder palette: the slate-grey and silver-grey of wintery Scotland, and – always low in the afternoon sky – a gash of his distinctive yellow. It is the cold light caught in a glass of white burgundy against the snow clouds and sombre Edinburgh afternoons which he used to set off the colours of Scottish beauty: black or russet hair, blue eyes, high coloured skin over high cheekbones.

Duff House, William Adam’s northernmost palace, is deserted on those few late autumn days when it is open to the public, the wind rattling in from the sea and the courteous attendants sparsely deployed in the darkening rooms: half-board custodians for a family gone abroad for ever. Sole visitor, and known to most of the guards, I can ask for blinds to be drawn, girandoles switched off, so that I can see past the varnish-reflections to the snowy clouds and the afternoon sunset over the Pentlands which Raeburn sketched in the distance behind the beautiful Mrs Veitch; and as always, his pencillings of white, yellow and apricot along the ridges of the fading hills.

Winter Scotland is defined in the colours of her eighteenth-century painters. The fields are the greyish-brown which is so often the background of Allan Ramsay’s portraits; the sky is the French grey which is laid in behind David Allan’s early conversation pieces. The greenish shadow that sets off the sitters of the outlaw-painter John Alexander is the last light falling through tall windows into panelled rooms. Alexander’s great ceiling at Gordon Castle, the Rape of Persephone with figures of the seasons, is destroyed: only a sketch remains from which to conjecture its allegory of long years of waiting for the lost king in the isolated castles of the north. Rumours and disappointments; a devout and devoted patience to sustain the years of waiting; the elegant portraits by the elder Alexander hanging in the same cold-lit panelled rooms as his son Cosmo’s clandestine royal portraits.

Corelli is the ghost music of the Scottish eighteenth century: ever-present, an undersong to the popular tradition of fiddle music as much as to the rare quartets and concerti grossi which native composers prepared for the meetings of the musical societies. The Aberdeen Musical Society still gives a few concerts a year, the most ambitious always on or about 22 November, St Cecilia’s day. Rain and a constant murmur of wind from off the sea. Dark began to fall over the glistening cobbles and mirroring flagstones before the afternoon was half over. The King’s College drew in behind its walls and under its towers against the night. I had been working all afternoon in the rare-book stacks and cages: functional and secure structures of the post-war, but filled with the ordered, still extraordinary miscellany of books which an ancient university gathers to itself over centuries. It came to the time for the stacks to be locked for the night, and I came out into the persistent rain glimmering between the tower and the lit stained-glass windows.

Cosmo Alexander’s painting of St Cecilia has presided over the concert since the 1750s. As we were in the chapel setting up the canvas, resplendent in its rose-gold and azure – the colours of its creator’s Roman exile – the tenor was practising his song to end the first of the three sections which comprise an eighteenth-century concert programme. The single sheet of music for ‘Lochaber No More’ had come out of the papers of the family for whom Adam built Duff House: a popular song set, as was the custom throughout the eighteenth century, with accompaniment for harpsichord and cello. The words are elusive, careful, highly coded, a Lowland imagination of the Highlands of the 1720s; the work of Allan Ramsay, a poet whose works are full of allegories of loss and restitution after long absence and mourning.

But the tune – ‘King James’s March to Ireland’, with its alternative titles of ‘Limerick’s Lamentation’ or ‘Sarsfield’s Lamentation’ – speaks unequivocally of Stuart loyalty. This music comes out of the world of the resistance to the post-1688 mainstream: out of the ‘dark corners’ of the islands, Lancashire, North Wales, Aberdeenshire, the Highlands. Out of the outposts of the exiles – Douai, Paris, Rome, Valladolid. From the heather seminary of Scalan, lost in the wild uplands of Glenlivet, where the black rain off the sea which strikes the chapel windows will be falling already as snow.

I go to swim in the almost empty pool at the university, through the bitter November twilight. A fair-haired boy is whistling ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ in the shower, the whole tune through several times. Listening to the forlorn innocence of the air, I wonder if he knows the words:

There is a single leaf of paper in the university manuscript safe, a few hundred metres away, with Allan Ramsay’s Jacobite contrafaction to the same tune,

Which brings back the memory of another freezing twilight in Cambridge in the late seventies of the last century. A comfortless student room with a bare light bulb, raw cold radiating from uncurtained windows. There must have been a group of us ready to go to dinner, waiting for one straggler. Conversation faltered, and a dark-haired man in a pea-jacket buttoned up to the neck against the frosty night began to sing ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’, and sang it right through, in all its sad bravado:

Song and singing alike were an instance of the melancholy swagger which is unique to England – Scotland encompasses both lamentation and a fine, flaunting defiance in the face of despair and the devouring winter, but nothing like that.

Just before Christmas the hard frosts come to glitter in sunlight which barely clears the southern horizon. At the castle on the morning of Christmas Eve, the sweeping vaults of the hall are filled with cold air and the scent of woodsmoke. Times and eras overlap for a moment when I ask the laird’s student nephew (a fencing champion) what it is that the angels of Baroque paintings are doing with their swords, when they hold them high across their bodies with wrist set firm. The young man leaps to his feet and snatches a seventeenth-century rapier from the wall, emptiness and freezing air about him, as he flashes and dances in silence, in the masque-cloud of his breath. The lowest winter sunlight blazes along the blade.

It is like my friend Hugh Buchanan’s paintings of great houses in the dead of winter – astragals casting long shadows across the floors, brightness striking upwards in rainbows through the chandeliers. White light in frozen air where the barred shutter has been left, for a moment, ajar. The silence of an empty house so absolute that it seems as if it would call inhabitants unto itself in the months of short days.

In the stone-vaulted room at Drum Castle, a few days into the New Year, I read the letters of long-dead exiles, art-dealer sons and grandsons of the fugitives of the mid-eighteenth century. One extraordinary set of letters is about travelling to the Americas and being blown off course to Cuba: suffocating heat and unremitting rain and fear of death by yellow fever. The writer, temporarily ruined by speculation, is pleading for money to buy his way out of quarantine, to escape back to Europe at any price. Afterwards I go up with the custodian into the shuttered, immaculately swaddled, rooms of the piano nobile. Cold beyond cold, stillness beyond stillness. The shutters, opened one by one, light a sequence of portraits by Cosmo Alexander, with their slightly archaic assurance of technique, and the melancholy inherent in their defiant assertion of an alternative order of reality. And in the last room, in the dimness of the stone keep itself, we see a barking mad and tremendous self-portrait of the Regency laird’s brother, in the character of Milton’s Satan as visualised by Fuseli, naked amongst the storm clouds and muscled like the Farnese Hercules.

Leaving the house in early afternoon, I walk back to the car over white lawns and between frosted yews and rhododendrons. My eyes are so tired from reading spidery handwriting in low light that I must slow down to read the small road signs on the back roads home, through the scatter of frost and snow, across the marl and smoke-grey of the misted landscape. I reach home just as the first flakes of snow are hovering, to find my wife and a friend out on the lawn, wrapped in bright shawls, inspecting a sapling at the edge of the grass, as though the air were as warm as in summer.

When the snow had turned to the cold rain of February, I arrived in Edinburgh off the train after dark. Rain and blackness and the empty streets and wynds looked as they did thirty years ago, and as they must have looked long before that. The streets as empty as they were when I was walking through cold London, in the lost days after Christmas twenty years ago, the days ‘between the years’. And there I came upon a merry-go-round at the end of a frosty street. Stud of Golden Ponies and Hunters was written round the top of it, and its lights were reflected in wavering streaks on wet cobbles – it must have been around Long Acre, somewhere on the edges of Covent Garden. It is not so much the coming upon it that stays in the memory as the movement away from the mechanical music, in lightest evening rain, and away from the strings of lights into dark, seasonally-empty streets.

Empty, merciless flights of steps leading up from the station in Edinburgh to the high street were lit by the sparse, very white light of the iron lanterns high on the walls. The cliffs of the tenements of the Old Town stretched up to block the sky, echoing my footfalls. Six o’ clock and nobody about. Then, out of breath, I came over the rim of the ridge and into that great anti-climax, the point where the High Street of the Old Town somehow fails to broaden out into a convincing square around the high church of St Giles. There is an open space with fine buildings around it, cobbles gleaming in the rainy night, but no sense of the heart of a city, far less of a kingdom. The Castle is at one end of the ridge and the Palace at the other and this is just a swelling in the street between them, not a place that anyone especially likes or remembers or feels anything about. The only thing that stirs anyone to a sense of place or history seems to be the tomb of the Marquis of Montrose inside St Giles, which sometimes even now has spontaneous offerings of flowers. Interesting, given what an ambiguous figure James Graeme was, leading a forlorn hope against his better judgement and against half of his convictions.

But what a difference between coming upon this vacancy at the heart of things and stumbling upon the Grote Markt in Brussels on a foggy winter night, wandering through the centre of the city after the Royal Library had shut. Christmas market, flares and torches along the façade of the Stadhuis. Fine things being sold, like Bohemian glass in archaic patterns. Live and very loud choral music. Hot chocolate and amandines. The most wonderful thing was the brightness of flames and lamps striking upwards, so that the gilding on all the façades flickered against the dark. Golden St Michael and the golden devil flaring and wavering, fighting against the night sky.

Speculating without certainty as to where other heroes of Scotland might be buried (how many might simply be in the Abbey church at Dunfermline?) I came to the door of the National Library. When I reached the almost-empty reading rooms at the top of the cold stairwell, the newly acquired Gordon manuscripts were waiting for me. The Latin history of the family, their Jesuit chaplain’s account of the Battle of the Glens, copies of devotional poems by St Robert Southwell. As I read through them, I barely saw the brown ink on the laid paper, but felt rather as though I were looking up into the windy solitudes where the glens meet around Corgarff, where the pinewoods hide the church of Our Lady of the Snows.

The rain had gone off but the cold was growing as I walked down to dinner in the New Town, with a gusting wind lying in wait at the corners. Glaring lights, and shops still open in Princes Street and George Street, but the streets grew quieter and quieter once I was among the tall stone houses on the downhill slope past the dark gardens. What an extraordinary survival this whole classical quarter is – its flats and houses are still mostly lived in, and there have been few catastrophic additions. The whole area is intensely Scots in its reasonable conformity of façades, and even more characteristic in the wild variety of the flats and houses which lie behind them. Sometimes there are two modest Georgian villas, complete with spacious halls and flying staircases, one on top of the other, reached from a stone tenement stair. There are whole painted rooms, painted overdoors and overmantels. Sometimes, as with my destination this evening, the whole area behind the façade is still one house.

I find a distinctive, and again very Scots, combination of quiet late-eighteenth-century furniture with modern paintings, ancient ceramics, a long table scattered with engraved maps. The first-floor window at the back looks out into the branches of a weeping birch, as though into the high glens. Looking at it, the next morning, I remembered my hosts leading off a dance twenty-five years ago in a long, panelled room far to the north, with the snows of Glenshee deep outside. How beautiful they were and how dashing twenty-five years ago – everything which is to be loved in Scotland partakes to some degree of that dash and gaiety in defiance of the heart of the winter.

I caught the train just before the late snows descended, and then was caught fast by the unseasonable weather which comes here when the winter is ending to the south. Fields and streams around our house were blank: snow lying over the frozen water and cold furrows. And then came snowfall after snowfall, borne on a wind straight out of the north, raking the coast of Norway and the icy seas.

Evenings alone: lamplight and silence, and the distant mustering of the storm. And remembering reading like this, on a winter night in Holland thirty years ago, with the brick-paved quay outside as silent as the remotest hills. A new language, a dictionary and a book of poems by Martinus Nijhoff. A whole solitary evening to make sense of fourteen lines.

Nijhoff’s sonnet ‘Het Souper’ from his collection Vormen: awareness of the wet river-mud underlying the urban perfection of Holland becomes for a moment unbearable when a gust of night wind blows open a window just as conversation fails at a supper-party. In that instant all that menaces civilisation and human community seems present in the room. Bread and wine drop from frightened hands; candle-flames flicker and are almost extinguished. The laboriously-drained marshes stir again like water, like despair born of loneliness in company:

‘The lands under the house weltered like water in the night’: even in the most civil cities of Europe, the wilderness is a lurking and unbalancing threat of zwarte eenzamheid, of black solitariness. At the end of the sonnet, the winter wind has conquered the human circle within the house: its violence has burst in, the marshes of the Rhine delta are implacable:

‘But when the winds are screaming past the roofs, / forget what our weak heart cries for, / laugh and clash the glasses until they break.’

Nijhoff also translated, with a great care and understanding, Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’:

My colleague and friend Bart Westerweel told me about walking through the residential streets of Amsterdam late on a cold Christmas Eve, through fine snow feathering and turning in the light of the streetlamps. An attic window was suddenly thrown open and an English voice started to declaim ‘A cold coming they had of it’ to the empty street, and Bart joined in, right through to the end. Then the window shut quietly. Then snow in the empty streets, thirty years ago.

There was an extraordinary illusion as I walked with the dog down through the drifts deepening across Aberdeenshire towards the house: the blizzards of the night had somehow rounded the contours of the surrounding hills, and the sharpness of the morning frost had cleared the air into a magnifying lens. The hills themselves appeared like great snowdrifts folding about the house, looking as if they were going to fall in and bury us altogether. I sometimes think of myself, as I get older and live on in this remote place just in sight of the mountains, as the host in a Buchan thriller, in the house where the protagonists spend the last night before they take to the wilderness, the frozen heather, the rocks above the snowline.

In profound snow, the heart of the house goes dark as the skylights over the stairwell are blocked. In the vine-house that opens off the drawing room, the geraniums and orange trees are dim in diffused light. Late snowfall is the time when it comes into its own. An airy daemon in one of Jonson’s masques challenges his master to make ‘[his] glasses, gardens in the depth of winter where [you] will walke [ … talking] with all birds and beasts in their own language’3 In the deepest snow, this late-season snow, the little greenhouse heater and the care taken in repairing the building pay us back with jasmine and hyacinths and narcissus, the smell of warm geranium leaves, and all of it with the snow and the twilight behind and the water butts frozen so hard outside that watering cans have to be carried through the house.

The heart sinks at twilight, however much enjoyment may have come from sitting in a darkened room watching the last light going to nothing in the western sky, buff yellow against blued slate-grey. There is a kind of stark resentment at switching on the lamps again, and still so early. Snow and wind and everyone’s nerves finally fraying, looking at bare branches in front of snow through windows blind with the sleet sticking to the panes; at the oyster-coloured gashes in the racing, steel-grey clouds which come bringing more snow with the early nightfall. Another twilight, and the lamps switched on again so early, we grow weary of the same curtained and lamplit rooms however much they are loved or dreamed about at other times. Finally the patience snaps, waking again to the predictable scream of the wind round the house and hearing the rattle at the windows. You come almost to dread the icon at the top of the weather forecast on the computer which says that weather warnings have been issued yet again.

All of this found expression in a disgruntled letter to my mountaineering friend in the pianura of Cambridge as February gave way to March: a letter about loneliness and the unrelenting snows and the unchanging grey ridges of the hills on the skyline: terribilis est locus iste. Grave and wonderful beyond description and every breath of the silent, frozen air is a wonder, but I am still weakened and tired out by it all, longing for orchards and music and company. The scoured dimness on the hillsides, gashed with snow, is hardly a colour; more an aspect of life which has to be endured. Why do this to oneself, why watch out the winter to its end, why did we not take up the invitation to join my cousin far to the south of Europe, amidst the vineyards and lemon trees?

But at last the wind veers to the south in the night. At last, at last. The sun, bright with a sudden, aggressive brightness, is starting to soften the snowbanks in the warmer air; it draws a flash and glitter from the black water in the millpond, starting to move again after running for a week and more under a shroud of grainy ice. The leap of the heart at that bright trail is an index of how much, infinitely more than you realise, the imprisonment of the snowbound days can oppress you.

The first day when it is warm at noon, I go to the front door and test the granite step with my hand to see if it has lost the chill of the four bitter months just past. And it has. The pots of striped yellow crocus on either side of the steps have lost their caps of snow, and there I sit in the sun for the first time since the end of October, with my old dog leaning against my shoulder, watching the snow on the brown and yellow striped flowers turn translucent, then to minute pebbles of ice; and then milky, then clear water, then nothing, only light, light, nothing at all.

1 Martinus Nijhoff, Een Geur van hoger Honig (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1990), p. 52.

2 Ibid., p. 153.

3 Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941; reissued 1970), VIII, p. 713.