When it comes to your go-to place, are you a mermaid of the deep, a mountain lion or a creature of the lake?
One of my colleagues, Richard Cook, is a cameraman and photographer living in Scotland. Much of the recent series of Grand Designs: The Streets was filmed by him. He flies a light aircraft and has canoed around Scotland’s coast. He is gung ho and a good Scotch egg.
Last month he gave me two prints of his fabulous photographs of Scottish landscapes. They were a touching and generous gift. I took them home and didn’t open them because the house was full of builders’ dust, but a week later I found a clean table and gently unrolled them, prising them from their tissue wrappers. Then unrolled them some more. They were huge – 6ft long and 2ft high – and powerfully dark. One was of Glencoe in low cloud and the other of a lone Harris mountain viewed from across a sea inlet on Lewis. Two brooding images of places I have found moving and intensely powerful.
I feel grateful for these giant pictures, not least because they are Richard’s work, but also because they speak to me with the same loud silence as mountains. A physicist once explained that the power of mountains lies in their scale and mass: they exert a horizontal gravity, an irresistible physical magnetic pull on the bones in our bodies and the iron in our blood.
To live next to a mountain is to sense that sideways force and to succumb at times to its vastness. The late 18th-century traveller would have recognised this strong emotional response as coming close to sublimity, a state that economist and philosopher Edmund Burke defined in 1757 as an artistic effect productive of extreme awe and admiration. ‘Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,’ he wrote. Think giant waterfalls, precipitous cliffs and an addictive cocktail of danger and beauty.
Of course, not everyone enjoys the Alps and Cairngorms, nor senses that awe. Some enjoy the skiing, preferring the beach in summer. Others simply feel addicted to the human complexity of city life. You might, as Edward Short does, prefer the wild elemental nature of the sea, which he tried to capture by building his lighthouse-inspired Grand Design on the north Devon coast. Or you may be a contemplative creature of the forest who can commune barefoot with a sanctuary woodland and the whispered secrets of the natural world.
It is hard to tell who is drawn to where, but it is just possible that we find ourselves attracted to one or perhaps two principal natural envir
