Wandering Across Deeper Spaces

Last summer, I traveled to the U.K. for a whole mix of personal and professional reasons. Prior to conferences and archaeological excavations, I was lucky enough to get to spend some time with my partner and an old friend, clambering around some of the places in the Lake District where we had met years ago. It was fun re-experiencing old landscapes and discovering new ones. Part of the joy was introducing my partner (who had never been to the U.K.) to a place that meant a lot to me.

On one of our days in the Lakes, we found the time to hike the summit of Stone Arthur, a low mountain peak (or a fell in Lakes terms) not far from the town of Grasmere. Stone Arthur is a Wainwright, a term denoting that the avid hiker Alfred Wainwright included it in his 1955 book A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells. I had recently picked up a new Reader’s Edition printing of the first volume, which mimics the original editions, complete with Wainwright’s own hand-drawn sketches. Determined to climb at least one Wainwright fell before we left, the two of us made our way out of Grasmere and towards The Swan tavern, our first landmark.

Stone Arthur was not a hard climb, the day was beautiful, and we had our phones as backup, so we tried to navigate our way up the side via Wainwright’s hand-drawn map. Our only real landmarks were the small circles marking stone walls and the curving lines which denoted streams, but steadily we matched up our ascent to his, and reached the summit. The view was stunning - Grasmere below, hills stretching in every direction. I pulled out the guide and scribbled down some notes on his map, determined to flesh it out when we found ourselves back in town. Perhaps the greatest joy was knowing that I had followed Wainwright’s route, a path covered by many, many people over the decades, gaining some glimpse of another person’s personal topography.

The idea of glimpsing another person’s experience of the landscape has always been deeply fascinating to me. The way we move through our daily spaces, assigning meaning to the buildings, routes, and land around us - all of it makes up some part of who we are, at any point in our lives.

Through a lot of good fortune, I’ve been able to undertake graduate work in history. After a fair few years of working my way around the medieval, I am preparing to write a Ph.D. dissertation on those same subjects of landscape and human experience. My work focuses on what is today southern Scotland and northern England, in the fifth through eighth centuries - the very beginning of the early Middle Ages. Armed with my own experience in the field, good advice, and a fair amount of reading, I hope to bring the passion for human landscape into my historical scholarship.

This Substack will serve a couple of purposes. It will help me iron out a whole lot of ideas on what landscape and memory mean to me. It will force me to write about those ideas in clear and expressive prose. Perhaps most importantly of all, it will hopefully provide a little good reading for some of y’all, who get to come along on virtually on a few of my wanderings.

I plan to talk about a lot of things - mapping and space, landscape and the investment of memory, the early Middle Ages (and beyond!), and the joy of a good ramble.

I’ll be publishing one to two posts per month as I can, with each being a sort of word-ramble drawing on bits of research I’m doing alongside memories, pictures, and the sort of experiences that are shaping my thoughts as I go. I’ve been scratching my head for a few weeks, and there’s a few questions I’d love to delve deeper into and share:

• How do human mobility and movement shape the idea of the core and the periphery? What does it mean to be far from the seat of power, or to be a frontier as opposed to a center?

• How do the natural and built environments affect the human experience of space?

• How does memory, real and imagined, intersect with this human experience to form a sense of the past built in the landscape?

• How can we reconcile these layers of human interaction - through movement, memory, construction and exploitation - with the landscape to better understand the many dimensions of late antique and early medieval frontiers?

If all this sounds interesting to you, welcome aboard, and please do send me reading recommendations, comments, or your own stories about your special landscapes. I look forward to sharing this all with you!

Bibliography, Used and Recommended

• Wainwright, Alfred. A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells. Reader’s Edition. Vol. 1: The Eastern Fells. London: Frances Lincoln, 2017.