Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, eds. Gareth Evans and Di Robson

Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings is an important publication of writing about place in Britain, according to David Cooper and Rachel Lichtenstein, who contend that the book creates a literary map of England, Scotland, and Wales, and is part of the shift from thinking about space to thinking about place in the UK (1-2). I got interested in opening the copy of Towards Re-Enchantment I bought and forgot about a year ago because of the essay Cooper and Lichtenstein posted on the website of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing, and since the book contains no editors’ introduction, I have appropriated that essay as a kind of introduction to the book. Cooper and Lichtenstein suggest that the reasons for the return to place after the previous creative and critical interest in questions of space “are complicatedly various,” including “the anxiety regarding the meaning of place within the context of late-capitalist globalisation to the apocalyptic fear generated by the climate emergency,” and they argue that place writing, as demonstrated by Towards Re-Enchantment, “is characterised by an attentiveness to the textural particularities of specific sites: an attentiveness that is often generated through the embodied experience of walking-through-place” (1-2). When I read those words, I realized that the manuscript I’ve been working on for the past two years fits within this category better than any other I’ve come across, and that I really ought to write another chapter in the exegisis I’ve prepared, one that discusses place-writing as that manuscript’s context. But I’m not going to do that, because that exegesis is already too long. Enough is enough. I’m sure my committee members, about to be burdened with that lengthy document, would agree.

Towards Re-Enchantment begins with Robin Robertson’s “Tillydrone Motte,” a short poem that, according to the map provided by the editors, describes a hill in Seaton Park, which Google tells me is in Aberdeen. A motte is an ancient earthen mound, constructed for defence, which explains Robertson’s description of it as “my castle-keep, watchtower” (9). Robertson is not just writing about a place, but about her childhood engagement with that place, which she knew intimately, both its geographical features and the herons and cormorants in the nearby River Don. At its conclusion, the poem returns Robertson to the present, “a time when I would find / the trees unclimbable, the river too fast to ford,” and that the mound is a “Bronze Age burial cairn,” not a motte, which ought to be called “tulach draighionn,” which means, in Gaelic, “the hill of thorns” (10). I know nothing about Robertson, but I sense affinities in that last stanza between the colonial histories of Scotland and Saskatchewan, the way that the colonizers’ language has overwritten the Indigenous languages of place and that the colonizers’ stories have overwritten the Indigenous stories of place.

Iain Sinclair’s “Water Walks” follows. It begins in familiar territory for those familiar with Sinclair’s writing: a park in London’s East End, where a Hasidic family (a man and two sons) watches the River Lea. From that beginning, Sinclair turns to a description of Springfield Park: its history, most of all, as a “dream of the good place” for urban workers on holiday (13-14). “Springfield Park was a conceptual space that was also a room without a ceiling, curtained with trees, box hedges closed around formal benches, a carpet of spongy grass,” Sinclair writes (14). He describes a century-old photograph of “Park Keepers and Constabulary” whose job was to maintain the “sham” of the park as a “pastoral idyll” (14-15). It was a “true sham” because the park was surrounded by industrial concerns that could be seen and smelled within the park (15). Sinclair is interested not just in the history of this place, though, but also in its geology and hydrology: the way that the water that falls as rain makes its way into the Lea (16).

“What is it about this place that makes it worth invading?” Sinclair asks (16). It is a “naggingly present motif” in “the clotted narrative of East London,” “a still point” which offers a “quietly eroticised pleasuring of the senses” (16-17). Here Sinclair returns to history, to a book by a local historian, Benjamin Clarke, that record his walks through the area, presenting “accidental evidence” that justifies “his own obsession with the magic of place” (17). From Clarke’s pedestrian excursions, Sinclair turns to his own, the product of a life lived in the area. He suggests that the trick to a rewarding walk is “to delete internal projections and fantasies, mental trailers that act as a nuisance filter between world and self, and to empty that space until landscape flowed through, freely and without editorial interference” (18). That is his method: to “become this becoming, alert not alarmed, walking just far enough for the process to work” (18). The loud café in the park, where Sinclair is surrounded by the new denizens of this place—“new cyclists, map readers, oarsmen, nature bureaucrats, legacy technicians” (18)—doesn’t completely erase other, past Springfields, such as the one where the poet John Clare was kept in an asylum. I just rediscovered Sinclair’s book about Clare and his escape from that asylum while cleaning up my work space this morning, and this essay is encouraging me to turn to that book now, despite its length.

“Making yourself ready to accept the dictation of place is the first requirement: and then the unexpected, that wished-for second consciousness, will happen,” Sinclair continues (19). In this case, that “second consciousness” is an awareness of Clare and his journey. “The effort of the thing, the dream of the walk, is exclusion, winnowing the deluge of impressions, sights, signals, sounds, to essence,” he writes (19). He takes notes, but on this occasion he has left his camera at home, “making more room for those messengers, manifestations of enchantment, to reveal themselves,” even though his notes seem to have described the more prosaic features of the park, including a solitary Muscovy duck and a pair of nesting coots (19). A broken pipe flooding the path and a section of the canal drained “for cosmetic improvement” leave him pondering the “imploded economy” and “submerged eco-system” of the area, with its stark divisions between rich and poor (20). “These incidents could be arranged to form a pattern, the armature of a narrative; or they could stand, without embellishment ,as a list, a fragment with no beginning and no end,” he notes, before describing two people in the park, a man and a woman completely unaware of each other, and the “painterly” effect of the contrast between them (20). “The drama of this non-event,” Sinclair suggests, “is an improper conclusion; more like the start of another tale. It is self-sufficient, requiring no additional commentary” (20). He then describes yet another human presence, a blind man “leashed to contradictory dogs” which remind him of two empty plinths which used to house sculptures of dogs, which have been removed in order to be repaired (20-21). When Sinclair returns home, he finds an e-mail from Rachel Lichtenstein, describing an encounter with a woman in a bookshop who told her terrible stories about a nearby mental hospital where she worked in the 1960s.

Next, Sinclair shifts to another place, Stamford Hill, and the people he sees there, including a poet named Yang Lian who settled in London after the Tiananmen massacre. Lian, according to Sinclair, is interested in place, and paarticularly in Stamford Hill (which seems to be near Springfield Park), as is his wife, Yo Yo. “It wasn’t, in truth, a conversation, but an audience with a privileged person,” Sinclair recalls (23). He recorded that audience and provides a transcript of Lian’s thoughts about the Lea Valley and the role of the poet as “an archaeologist of now” (23). Lian identifies with that valley: “Lea Valley is me. I am the Lea Valley” (24). Awareness, communicated through poetry, is the key word, according to Lian, not just for that place but for “all other matters” (24). Both the inner and external landscapes function as poetic inspiration for Lian, and the external landscape can be transformed into inner landscape. 

In the essay’s last section, Sinclair meets with one of Lian’s translators, who talks about the way that the places of East London act as inspirations for the poet, about the way that they provide opportunities for contemplative solitude. The River Lea, he continues, 

solaced Izaak Walton, Arthur Waley and, in our own time, the photographer Stephen Gill. The explanations of its power are always different. Whether it offers a willow-shaded fishing spot or edge-of-the-city grounds for wandering and cycling, the attraction lies in its accessible obscurity. The knowledge that nothing is explained or morally improving, overwhelmed by great public schemes. (26)

Sinclair concludes, “here is the place, when conditioned reflexes close down, to which my feet still carry me” (27). Like Lian, it is. part of him, I think, and he is part of it, of the water that functions as memory, repeating, erasing, and inspiring (27).

The next essay is Richard Mabey’s “On the Virtues of Dis-Enchantment,” which is about East Anglia, a place I only know about from reading W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. East Anglia is reputed to be too flat, topographically and culturally, to be of any interest. Mabey wonders what effect landscape has on the people living in it—whether the wind and water characteristic of East Anglia excite or imprison its inhabitants. “If there isn’t such a thing as a regional character, there is a shared narrative, an ongoing conversation about ourselves,” Mabey writes (30). Those narratives accumulate to become “a communal self-portrait, a background hum that is part of the region’s ambience. Sometimes they are dramatically acted out and become literal parts of the landscape” (30). The narrative of East Anglia, he continues, “is more enthralment than fear,” both a battle against the water but also a “continuing compulsion to let it in—to the imagination and the heart” (30). He recalls the marshland sports day held by his village in the 1970s, and his late friend Roger Deaken, who “made the ultimate local odyssey by swimming across Suffolk, through off-limits parkland lakes and weedy streams and the underwater maze of fugitive channel markers in the Blythe estuary, out to where Suffolk dissolves seamlessly into the sea” (31). Indeed, the local dialect and the landscape share certain qualities, according to Mabey: both centre themselves on water. 

Here he shifts to think about the Norfolk Broads, flooded peat mines near Great Yarmouth, a fishing town, bombed during the twentieth century’s wars and bulldozed by 1960s redevelopment schemes, becoming a deepwater container port with sprawling suburbs. “But it still feels like a hurt and dislocated community, under a kind of foreign occupation,” Mabey writes (33). The Norfolk Broads themselves—400 square miles of open water and marsh—were poisoned by chemical run-off from agricultural land. “What had been an ecological paradise came close to turning into the aquatic equivalent of a run-down housing estate,” he tells us, using an odd metaphor (33-34). Now the area is a protected National Park, “one of the richest wildlife areas in lowland Britain” (34). Nevertheless, climate change may drown the freshwater Broads in seawater; they cannot be defended from the rising North Sea.

“Water adds both detail and indefiniteness to a landscape,” Mabey continues. “If East Anglia’s flatness is an illusion in the vertical dimension, it is also horizontally” (35). The fens and marshes “are all electric with subtle and shifting particularities” (35). The water “makes renewal a continuous possibility” (36). He turns to describe his house in Norfolk and its surroundings, slowly moving away from the house to its wider location. In some areas, land reclaimed for agriculture is being turned back into fens, although the change “isn’t a grand exercise in human abandonment”: “the end result should be a diverse and regenerated human landscape as well as a vast wildlife reserve, with hardy cattle grazing the wetlands, and small-scale industry based around indigenous resources like reed and willow” (38). It may be, he concludes, that East Anglia will become “a place where people go with the flow” (38).

A photo essay, “May Morn” by Jane Rendell, follows. It juxtaposes found text about an early modernist building against what appears to be apartment blocks and houses built in the 1960s. I watch British police procedurals on TV, and I’m always shocked at the ugliness and apparent flimsiness of architecture from that period. This essay, by comparing the description of that early modernist building’s disrepair with the tower blocks of (I’m guessing) London, does something odd. No one is present in the written descriptions, but many of the photographs include residents, mostly alone.

Then Rendell presents us with a text that begins with her response to video work by the artist Elina Brotherus, entitled Spring. As she watched that work, she found herself returning to memories of places: “a derelict house in the green belt where in spring we found photographs of a brave new world of modernist high-rise housing,” the home of her Welsh great aunt, an abandoned cork factory in Catalunya (50). The derelict house, which she called “Moss Green,” becomes the essay’s focus. She describes it in detail, “the arresting beauty of its slow yet gentle decay” (51), the still charming atmosphere, its slow collapse, and the items she salvaged from it, including a book entitled New Architecture of London: A Selection of Buildings since 1930, which was the source of the photographs in her essay. She tracked down most of the buildings in those photographs, discovering as she did so that many of them had already been demolished. She used an online real-estate service, primelocation.com, to look at those buildings. “Searching for modernist icons through primelocation.com has been a stark reminder of what has happened to the socialist ideals of modernism,” she writes. “Some of the modern movement’s public housing projects have become oases of cool property in the London postcodes associated with the rich” (53-54). Others, in poorer neighbourhoods, have fallen into neglect. Now, modernist architecture “is often seen as intimately tied to social deprivation and this has forced the designers of certain regeneration schemes to adopt a new architectural language: one which is not so obviously ‘modern’ and is therefore capable of suggesting optimism, community and better standards of living in a different way” (54). I found myself thinking about Regent Park in Toronto, a modernist planned community that is being demolished because, as it turned out, it didn’t work all that well.

She wonders about the person who lived in Moss Green, whether he or she was an architect, and posits the existence of two modernisms: one early, tied to the Arts and Crafts movement, and the other, “later phase of industrialisation and standardization” (55). She writes of the art of Tacita Dean and Rut Blees Luxemburg, who critique “the so-called failure of the modern project” (55). For her part, Rendell is not certain that modernism failed; instead, she writes, “I think the aspirations for social community and progress it embodies have been driven out, in England at least, by a Conservative and then a Labour government keen to promote an ideology of home-ownership” (55). A public that is mortgaged to the hilt will be afraid to dissent; houses have become investments, which is “a disaster for the left,” because by buying property one becomes “part of the propertied class and all that entails” (55). “There is no doubt that I would have remained closer to the truth of my political ideals if I had continued to rent a room, as I did in my student days,” she suggests (55). Still, she is not as “monstrous as an investor who purchases a flat in a modernist icon to leverage out an income in rent,” and she remains inspired by modernism (56).

Rendell suggests that in her image-text work, “the material decay of the photographs, as ink and paper documents, is counteracted by the aspiration of the just-completed buildings in the images” (56). She recalls returning to Moss Green, finding the house had collapsed. She remains hopeful about the future nevertheless: 

This is not a time for mouring, not a time for grieving the failure of the modernist project: such a gesture needs to be resisted. The ideals of modernism are to be cherished, not only aesthetically but also, and importantly, politically. It is, I think, precisely because an aspiration for social change remains that we are being presented, continuously, with an image of modernism as a project that has collapsed. This is the myth-making of Capitalist ideology. (57) 

Clearly I misread the photographs Rendell presented, mistaking their stains and blotches for a commentary on the architecture they represent, or perhaps viewing them through the lens of the dilapidated projects I’ve seen on television. She ends with a quotation from Frederic Jameson’s work on Walter Benjamin and nostalgia: “looking back to a past because it appears to be better than the problems of the present is not necessarily regressive, especially if it can be used to change the future” (57-58).

Ken Worpole’s “East of Eden” begins in a churchyard on the Essex coast, seeing a continuity between the church’s tower (used as a lookout point and beacon during wars) and the concrete defences from World War Two that are slowly disappearing into the sea on the nearby shingle beaches. That leads to a description of inhabited and uninhabited islands on that coast, particularly Mersea, before Worpole returns to St. Edmund’s, the church, recalling family vacations in the area in the 1950s. One recent grave is nameless, probably the body of someone drowned at sea, and Worpole thinks about cemeteries devoted to the anonymous dead. “It is difficult to imagine these near-empty landscapes, occasionally punctuated by small settlements, as humanly bearable without the solace afforded by their churches, whether as beacons in the landscape or as quiet interiors,” Worpole writes (64). That solace is mixed with the dead, since churches are the final resting-places of so many, particularly those who drowned in the North Sea. Worpole thinks about the journey from London into Essex, the industries one used to pass that no longer exist, ending at the coast, which “embodies a melange of the maritime and the industrial, the defensive and the arcadian, much of it now redundant, and gaining a disputed etymology of its own: slack nature, post-industrial wilderness, unofficial countryside, working wild, drosscape, edge condition, terrain vague” (65). Such places are hard to love, to appreciate as landscapes, and Worpole calls for a reinterpretation and revaluing of such places, “especially those that resist traditional categories of taste and approbation,” places which inspire ambivalence and uncertainty and contradiction. I like the way Worpole wanders—or rather apparently wanders—from one topic to another, following his ruminations wherever they take him.

The next section of Worpole’s essay considers the aesthetic conventions we use to judge the appeal of landscapes: the history of the representation of landscape in art; the slow shift to representing actual landscapes in paintings of Biblical stories; the shift from representations of the Crucifixion to the axis mundi, “the axis by which the human presence establishes itself in the world,” and a phenomenological interpretation of that vertical and horizontal axis, suggesting both human endeavour and place, and the representation of landscape in the contemporary world (68-69). He considers his book project 350 Miles, a collaboration with photographer Jason Orton, which represents the Essex landscape through distance, through vistas without human presence. “Documenting an absence is, after all, an important obligation for those engaged in forms of artistic representation which seek to honour those famously ‘hidden from history,’” Worpole writes (69-70). Human traces are everywhere in Essex, despite the area’s depopulation, and to photograph “this palimpsest of past lives and changing landscapes is a key part of a new aesthetic” (70). The Picturesque aesthetic tended to ignore the topography, economy, and social life of places, preferring instead a “gardenesque tradition” (72). But Essex contains elements which “are wholly a product of the modern world, including strategic areas of land reclaimed from the sea,” along with “the fortuitous creation of vast swaths of former industrial and military land now lying unusued and neglected” (72). Some of those projects were focused on social reform, symbolizing “a new world in the making,” although those modern feats of engineering, in particular, “have never been formally absorbed into the aesthetic representation of rural life and landscape” (73). Worpole notes that Tim Edensor objects to representations of rural landscapes that exclude power lines and cell towers and new buildings, exclusions that Worpole suggests are “as politically questionable as the re-writing of history, or the wilful manipulation of photographic images to misrepresent actuality” (73).

In the essay’s final section, Worpole posits that the landscapes of East Anglia have dominated recent topographical writing, and he wonders what Englishness might mean if it is defined by the topography of “low horizons and cold seas” (74). He considers the history of artists’ and writers’ colonies in Essex, suggesting that it has a certain outsider status and is not considered appropriately picturesque. “The county is seen to lack respectable heritage and legitimacy,” he states (75). He credits the work of Sebald as “crucial to the re-imagining of the region” and contends that it has reconnected East Anglia to the European narrative (75). He suggests that the “unassimilated landscapes” of Essex “need to be recorded and valued if they are not to be wilfully levelled or ‘improved’ in the name of some larger political programme” (75). Worpole considers the way that the material history of coal-mining districts has been deliberately destroyed, and argues that elsewhere, including in North America, “progress on re-imagining and bringing back into public esteem such former industrial landscapes is more advanced” (76). Some of that work is now happening in Essex, and nature reserves are being developed on what was once industrial land or military firing ranges. Yet, he concludes, little attention has been paid to integrating new housing estates into the landscape. “We are learning to find a home for the birds in these debatable lands, but not ourselves,” he writes. “It doesn’t have to be this way” (78).

Elisabeth Bletsoe’s “Votives to St. Wite,” an abstract poem about a place in Dorset that I can’t quite imagine, comes next. It’s about a churchyard, I think, but I’m not entirely certain. Perhaps if I had visited it, or seen a photograph, I might get it. Then Jay Griffiths’s “The Grave of Dafydd follows, about “the grave of that most beloved of the old poets,” in the ruins of a Cisstercian abbey near a village marked by poverty. The grave is near two ancient yew trees, supposed to be at least 1,400 years old, in the churchyard. Visitors have left gifts at the grave: “It is an untidy grave, and therefore full of life” (92). The yew tree overhead has been damaged in a fire, but it is sprouting again. Griffiths uses the tree’s own charcoal to write “Thank you, Dafydd” on a page from his notebook, and he buries it there—the only gift he can make (93). “Like any good hearth, this place seems to offer a long welcome, for it seems to ome that Dafydd would have loved people coming to sit by him and have a think,” Griffiths writes (93). He would like to sleep there. He recalls incidents from Dafydd’s life. Then, a man enters the churchyard and is startled by Griffiths’s presence, and Griffith realizes that the tree has left charcoal marks on his coat: “I’ve been written on” (94). Dafydd, I’m gathering—since I’ve never heard of him—was an earthy poet who wrote in Welsh, one of the most important writers of that language. “He was a troubadour, for sure, and a poet who sung himself into his harp, but something more,” Griffiths tells us. “He sung himself into the land, asking birds, animals and the wind to carry his messages to all his well-beloveds” (95). 

Here Griffiths shifts to a description of Wales itself, an “old land” where “the oldest stones of Europe are to be found” (96). The last wolves in Britain lived there. In spring, the season associated with Dafydd, “mid-Wales comes roaring to life”: daffodils, skylarks, blue sky (97). The dawn chorus, Griffiths writes, is “sunrise made audible”—a lovely turn of phrase (97). Wales is also a country where playing the harp has “an uninterrupted history,” and Griffiths considers that instrument and its metaphors (97). The harp takes him back to Dafydd, to oral literature, and from there, to lines and footpaths marked on the land. He compares the territoriality of farmers to that of kingfishers, and thinking of farmers slides into thinking about the differences between rural poverty and the wealth represented by second homes, which “disenchant the land, blocking the literal footpaths and the metaphoric songlines” (100). Second homes “have the tidied perfection of the grave,” compared to the life and dwelling of Dafydd’s grave (100).

The Teifi river runs near that grave, and Griffiths shifts to thinking about the various rivers of mid-Wales. He considers birds and animals and their noise, or song, which leads to another Welsh poet, Taliesin, who said he was born from a leaping salmon, and whose “poetry is fluent with a riverrun of metamorphosis” (101). The ancient, pre-Christian idea of metamorphosis takes Griffiths to Dafydd’s poetry again, where the Christian element seems tagged on, since his primary interest is pagan. Griffiths sits in the yew tree, reading Dafydd’s poetry, thinking about the link between poetry and shelter, between words (or songs) and home. He realizes that the tree has been fed by Dafydd’s body, and so he takes a pinch of earth and eats it: “Another kind of dispersal, another kind of metamorphosis of earth” (103).

Following Griffiths’s essay is Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem, “Hevenyssh,” about a place in Norfolk. It concludes with a quotation: the place lifts the speaker from her heart “as doth an hevenyssh perfit creature / that down were sent in scornynge of nature” (105). If I knew where that quotation came from, the poem would speak to me—mostly because, although I’ve never been to Norfolk, reading Mabey’s essay on that place has given me some sense of what it might be like. Perhaps poetry gives us a more intense sense of a place, but often it leaves out the details required to identify it—could that be possible?

After Greenlaw’s poem comes Robert Macfarlane’s “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.” A quotation from this essay is the reason I looked to find this book. The essay begins with a quotation from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous as an epigraph, but the first section, about flying above the ocean near the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, is entitled “Epilogue.” Perhaps this essay unfolds backwards? Or did the author, or editors, mean “prologue”? I’ll never know. In any case, the essay is not structured in reverse, since the first section proper, “In Which Names Are Spoken,” is identified with a Roman numeral: I. Macfarlane recognizes that the moor that makes up most of the Isle of Lewis looks like nothing, a large, flat, “apparently undifferentiated expanse” that seems to swallow all of our eyes’ “attempts at interpretation” (108). It is “MAMBA country: Miles and Miles of Bugger All” (108). Nevertheless, there is a rich language, collected in a document called Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary, to describe the moorland, many of which “are remarkable for their compressive precision” (109). This is the territory Macfarlane returns to in his later book, Landmarks. “That a lexis of such scope and such exactitude has developed is testimony to the intense relationship of labour which has long existed between the inhabitants of the Western Isles and their land,” Macfarlane writes; “this is, dominantly, a use-language—its development a function of the need to name exactly that which is being done, and done to” (109). That relationship is also an aesthetic one, Macfarlane contends, given the rich metaphors it contains, and the document he is describing is “a deeply moving text—a prose poem, really-and it instantly gives the lie to any perception of the Moor as a terra nullius” (109-10). The lexis the Glossary describes is “so supplely suited to the place being described that it fits it like a skin. Precision and poetry co-exist here: the denotative and the figurative are paired as accomplices rather than antagonists” (110).

 Place names on Lewis have a similar discrimination; Macfarlane cites a book by Richard V. Cox, The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance, a work that is almost 500 pages long and lists more than 3,000 place names and toponyms identifying natural landscape features, often with an “exceptional specificity” (110). Reading Cox’s work, Macfarlane suggests, is to realize “that the Gaelic speakers of this landscape inhabit a terrain that is—to borrow a phrase from Proust—‘magnificently surcharged with names’” (111). Until the twentieth century, most of the island’s inhabitants did not use paper maps; rather, they “relied instead on memory maps, learnt on the land and carried in the skull,” maps which “were facilitated by a wealth of first-hand experience” (111). “For their uses, these place-names were part of the internalised landscape necessary for getting from location to location, and for the purpose of guiding others where they needed to go,” Macfarlane continues. “It is for this reason that so many of the toponyms incorporate what is known in psychology and design as ‘affordance’—the quality of an environment or object that allows an individual to perform an action on, to, or with it” (111). These place names are both “audaciously accurate” and “also experiential”: “They arise in part out of the practice of moving through, seeing and using a landscape. To speak out a run of these names is therefore to create a story of travel—ann act of sequential naming in which both way-finding and way-faraing are implicit” (112). How different are the place names here, which seem to have been imposed on the landscape at random. 

Macfarlane cites Keith Basso’s 1996 book Wisdom Sits In Places, “an investigation into the radical situatedness of thought in the Apache people of Western Arizona,” as an analogy. “The Western Apache understand how powerfully language constructs the human relation to place,” he writes (113). “In the Apache imagination geography and history are consubstantial,” he continues. “Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically” (113). For the Apache, as well as the Hebrideans, “language is used both to describe and to charm the land. Word as compass and as cantrip. Speech as a way literally to en-chant the land—to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it” (114). I’ve seen other references to Basso’s work, and it seems to be something I should explore.

However, the place-language of the Outer Hebrides is being lost, as the number of Gaelic speaers declines and the names of places are forgotten by a younger generation that no longer works the moorlands in the same way. Something similar is happening in English, too: “Increasingly we make do with an impoverished vocabulary for nature and landscape” (115). For urban dwellers, the countryside is becoming “a blandscape,” identified through large, generic terms (115). “It is not, really, that the natural phenomena and forms themselves are disappearing, only that there are fewer people prepared to or able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go unseen: language deficit leads to attention-deficit,” he states (115). As the vocabulary of nature and landscape disappears, so does our knowledge of it, along with “the ethos that such a vocabulary might embody or encourage,” an ethos of understanding and imagining human relationships with more-than-human nature (115). “A basic language-literacy of nature is falling from us,” he continues, and along with that literacy, we are losing “a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with nature and landscape” (116).

That disenchantment is “the distinctive injury of modernity,” Macfarlane writes, citing Max Weber, a phenomenon that is “a function of the rise of rationalism, which demanded the extirpation of dissenting knowledge-kinds in favour of a single master-principle” (116-17). Disenchantment goes beyond our impulse to control nature to our emotional responses, the loss of our capacity for wonder, for being comfortable with not-knowing, for mystery. As a result, “the things around us do not talk bac to us in the ways that they should”: “As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework” (117). Macfarlane cites Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” here, something I return to in my attempts to understand this phenomenon. We now have “an inadequate and unsatisfying relationship with the natural world, and with ourselves too, beecause we have to encounter ourselves and our thoughts as mysteries before we encounter them as service providers” (117). One thing has become equivalent to any other: “The idea of fungibility has replaced the experience of particularity” (117). 

For Macfarlane, we need a language or a vocabulary that “resists and then reverses that replacement,” one that enables “the possibility of re-enchantment” which would enable the natural world to cease to be a mere thing and become something that knows we are present (118). Having a particular language about places allows us to speak clearly about them, because “it allows us to fall into the kind of intimacy with such places which might also go by the name of love or enchantment, and out of which might arise care and good sense” (118-19). Otherwise, “the separation of knowledge and nature moves us slowly towards a society in which it is increasingly unnecessary for us to be aware of where we live, beyond the housekeeping of our own private zones,” Macfarlane continues. “Once this awareness has lapsed, then landscapes beyond those precincts become much easier to manipulate for ill” (119-20). An undescribed and unregarded landscape “becomes more vulnerable to unwise use or improper action” (120).

That happened on the Isle of Lewis, where a wind farm was proposed for the moor, based on the sense that it was a desert wilderness without inherent value. To fight back, the islanders (the vast majority of whom did not support the project) “began to devise ways of re-enchanting the moor” (122). One aspect of that effort was mapping their moor-walks, “recording paths taken and events that occurred or were observed along the way” (122). Another was the creation of an archive of poems, ballads, folksongs and testimonies about the moor; another was the development of the glossary with which Macfarlane begins this essay. Islanders wrote protests to the government, one of which gave Macfarlane his title by calling for “‘a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’” (124). In the end, the development was stopped—if only temporarily. However, Macfarlane suggests that we urgently need “a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world,” that would re-enchant “the whole earth,” that would “allow nature to talk back to us and would help us to listen” (124-25). Such an admittedly impossible phrasebook “would provide us with the necessary tools for responsible place-making” (125). Its language would be precise and metaphorical; it would enable us not only to think about nature, but also “think with it,” and even more importantly, realize “that we are thought byit” (126). “It would be alert to the ways in which cognition is site-specific, in which certain landscapes can hold certain thoughts as they hold certain species or minerals,” he writes. “It would celebrate the fact that there are natural places that present possibilities of thinking that are otherwise unavailable or elsewhere absent” (126). It would “infuse inanimate objects with sentience” (126). It would “find ways of outflanking the cost-benefit framework within which, unwittingly, we do so much of our thinking about nature” (127). In his final paragraph, he quotes Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky on the importance of tactful language—language that sings, touches, affects, and keeps time, “recommending an equality of measure” (127). 

After Macfarlane’s essay comes Alice Oswald’s “Crow Meadow,” a lovely evocation of a field of bulls and buttercups in Devon, and the book’s final chapter, Kathleen Jamie’s essay “On Rona,” about the most western of the Western Isles, an account of a visit to that small place. Jamie and two friends spent some time there, on that now-uninhabited island (by humans: it’s home to grey seals and birds). Among those birds is a colony of rare Leach’s petrels, the nests of which one of Jamie’s friends was counting. Jamie helped, playing the petrel’s call from a tape recorder so that the birds would respond from their nests hidden among the stones. Their numbers, like the numbers of other birds on the island, are falling, rather precipitously. Jamie’s other friend “communed with stones,” particularly the ruined chapel and village (143). That friend, an archaeologist, was trying to determine whether the stone crosses in the graveyard were being stolen and whether the chapel had deteriorated compared to the 1950s. Inside the chapel’s ruins is an oratory with a stone altar. The people who lived there all died suddenly, about 1680. No one knows why. And then, when their time on the island was over, a boat comes, despite the forecast storm, and takes them back. It’s a vivid evocation of a place I’ll never see, and I’m happy to have read it.

So is place writing what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years? I think so—although the places I’ve been writing about are more prosaic than the Isle of Lewis or Rona or a mossy churchyard. I think that’s okay: perhaps all places deserve to be described, experienced, considered valuable. I’m going to carry on studying place-writing, I think, as well as practicing it, and I’m happy to have finally read this book.

Works Cited

Cooper, David, and Rachel Lichtenstein. “What is Place Writing?” Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University, June 2020. https://www.mmu.ac.uk/media/mmuacuk/content/documents/english/What-is-Place-Writing-June-2020.pdf.

Evans, Gareth, and Di Robson. Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, Artevents, 2010.

Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks, Hamish Hamilton, 2015.