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Subcribe to comment rss feedA photographer’s search for Rome’s firebrand in Caledonia’s haystack
Andy Hay
Andy Hay (b.1965) is a British fine art landscape photographer. He explores ancient landscapes and ancestral traces, aiming to discern the ambience created by their past. Through his work he encourages the contemplation of deeper time and invites audiences to learn from history.
After gaining a professional qualification in photography at Salisbury College of Art, from 1993 Andy worked for 20 years as a staff photographer with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, documenting their work. His photography has been widely published nationally and internationally by government conservation bodies, Wildlife Trusts, tourist authorities, The National Trust, Cambridge University, National Geographic, the Guardian, Telegraph, Times, the BBC & ITV, with portfolios featured in the British Journal of Photography and Professional Photographer magazines.
He has lectured in photography up to foundation degree level, has been a guest speaker at the Scottish Nature Photography Fair, camera clubs, RSPB members’, and naturalists' groups nationwide.
An exhibition of historically themed landscape photography at the Trimontium Museum, Melrose, Scotland.
From 11th September 2025 until 11th November 2025.
Through fine art photography, Andy’s first solo exhibition explores upwards of 25 Scottish landscapes historically associated with a legendary battle between Rome’s legions and massed Caledonian warriors – Mons Graupius. For over 1,900 years, the battlefield’s hillside location (as described by the Roman historian Tacitus) has remained a mystery: Andy traces its ancient ghost through the remains of Rome’s vaulting ambition from Stirling nearly to Inverness. To his knowledge, such a body of work is unique.
Not a one-sided tale about “the glory that was Rome” and the achievements of the Roman general Agricola – he also reflects on the impacts upon Caledonian society of Roman imperialism, employing visual metaphors, utilising modern infrastructure allegorically.
Andy employs a decades-old medium format camera system of the 6x6 square format, and black & white film, digitising and processing the results analogous to darkroom methods.
Recently gaining an MA in Photography from the Arts University Bournemouth clarified my methods and motivation for production. Renewing my love for the analogue process of photography and its relative simplicity, I choose to combine it with the fine control offered by the digital darkroom.
Inspired by the storytelling and stylistic aspects of the landscape photography of such as Fay Godwin, Sally Mann, Don McCullin and Bill Brandt, I made the photographs with a decades-old Bronica SQ camera system of the 6x6cm square format, and Ilford HP5+ black & white film, scanning the negatives myself and processing the results in Lightroom.
The exhibition prints have been produced by Loxley Colour of Cumbernauld as UV prints on panels of FSC plywood, a process I chose for its durability, faithful rendition of detail, and the material connection with the temporary structures put in place by the Romans in this part of Scotland, and those that they destroyed. I felt that it was imperative that my project, focussing as it does on the history of Scotland (and myself having Scots ancestry) should be produced in Scotland. This has, in turn, helped me in obtaining part funding from the Hope Scott Trust, who support the visual arts in Scotland, for which I am most grateful.
The exhibition venue – the Trimontium Museum - tells of “the interaction between the invading Romans and the native Iron Age tribes they encountered”, and the museum Trust has kindly allowed me to mount my exhibition in their multipurpose HALO space.
I plan to tour the exhibition further throughout Scotland at other museums, and already have enough work to fill a book, which is something that I aspire to for the future