"The Sinuosities of the Ground": Sir Walter Scott, Borders, Fiction, and Landscape

Summary of the Talk:

Dr Stewart explores Sir Walter Scott’s complex relationship with the Anglo-Scottish border landscape, arguing that Scott doesn’t simply depict the Borders as a static scenic backdrop or national metaphor. Instead, Scott’s writing presents the land as dynamic, unstable, and richly polyphonic—a place full of movement, ambiguity, and human labour.

Key Points:

• Romanticism and Place: The Romantic period saw an explosion of interest in landscapes—especially picturesque and sublime ones—but the Borders presented a challenge to tidy categorisation.
• Washington Irving’s Disappointment: Irving’s puzzlement at the Borders landscape (monotonous and underwhelming) is mirrored in Scott’s fiction, where the terrain defies tourist expectations.
• Scott’s Border Writing: In novels like Guy Mannering, Redgauntlet, and The Monastery, Scott depicts the land as a living character. Terrain like peat bogs isn't just scenery but something the characters must negotiate.
• Landscape and Labour: Scott knew the land intimately, from both personal experience and reading. His understanding of soil, drainage, and planting—reflected in practical works and diary entries—deepens the way he writes landscape as a site of human effort, not just aesthetic pleasure.
• Unstable Borders: The idea of the "Borders" is itself fluid—geographically, politically, and metaphorically. Attempts to map or define the region (natural features, administrative lines) often fail.
• Form and Plot: Scott’s plots are deliberately meandering. Characters often get lost (literally and metaphorically), mirroring the instability of the terrain and rejecting tidy narrative arcs. His stories resist control, offering instead a “boggy map and a broken compass.”
• Liminality and Ecology: Borders are not just national thresholds but ecological and existential ones. The region forces a constant renegotiation of boundaries—between solid and liquid, human and non-human, seen and unseen.
• Tourist Satire: Scott affectionately mocks tourist characters (e.g., in Rob Roy or Redgauntlet) who try to aestheticise the Borders but fail to see their material complexity.
• Concluding Thought: Getting lost in Scott’s work is the point. The land resists simplification, and so do the novels. The reader must learn, like the character, to navigate uncertainty.

Interesting Highlights:

• "Sinuosities of the ground": This phrase, drawn from Redgauntlet, encapsulates Scott’s vision of the landscape—shifting, elusive, animate.
• Scott as Environmental Thinker: His essays and experiments in landscaping show a proto-ecological awareness of how land can be shaped—and how it, in turn, shapes us.
• Scott and Labour: Echoed in the Q&A, Scott's landscapes are sites of work—digging peat, farming, draining bogs—not just poetic abstractions.
• The Monastery as Microcosm: Despite being critically undervalued, this novel powerfully exemplifies how Scott mixes aesthetic, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of place.
• Critique of Picturesque Tourism: Scott doesn’t reject the aesthetic entirely, but shows how it's only one lens—often insufficient for grasping the real complexities of place.
• Dialogue with Contemporaries: The talk drew interesting comparisons to artists like W.D. McKay and garden theorists, connecting Scott to wider currents in art and aesthetics.