Clouds are already on the ridge when you set out, and the road is single-track with sheep on it. They look at you. You wait. Past the last gate the ground goes to heather and peat, the path a pale thread you lose and find again, and somewhere below there is a burn you can hear long before you see it. A stag watches from a rock and decides you’re not worth the worry. A dyke runs straight up the hill and into the cloud for no reason anyone now living can explain. The country is bigger than the day, and it doesn’t adjust for you. That’s the arrangement. What you get in return is the one lit window at the end of it, which is worth more here than anywhere else you’ve been.
Sixty-six watercolor-inspired illustrations run from the far ridge to the fire, and the distance between the two is what the collection is about. Out on the moor almost nothing is yours. The weather decides the day, the animals hold the ground, and every made thing you pass, a dyke, a gate, a roofless croft, is somebody else’s patience left standing. The images out there are wide and mostly grey, because that’s the truth of it. Then the door shuts behind you and the scale collapses. A pair of boots on flagstones. Socks drying on a sill. A kettle going on the stove. The same painter who gave a whole glen one patch of sun now gives a jam jar of heather the entire frame, and that shift is the point. Cold makes a fire mean something. A big country makes a small room feel like a kindness. The palette holds it together, peat brown and slate and heather purple outside, with one warm note carried all the way through in a rusted roof, a lit window, a fire, until the blue of dusk closes it.
For distilleries and whisky brands, sporting estates and lodges, boutique hotels and inns, outdoor and heritage clothing labels, wool and textile brands, travel and lifestyle editorial, tourism boards, stationery and publishing, and anyone whose work involves sending people out into weather and welcoming them back. Highlands stands on its own. Set beside London Calling and Dreaming Spires it is the north to their city and college, the place the train in By Rail was heading when it crossed the moor, and the wet, low, brown cousin of Above the Treeline. A single thistle or a folded tartan will carry a label. The glens will hold a wall. The full set will take a brand from the first cloud on the ridge to the last lit window.
