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Sense of Place
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Littlestone
Littlestone
5386 posts

Edited May 06, 2012, 11:10
Re: Sense of Place
May 06, 2012, 10:52
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
John Muir.


Aye, that’s a truism if ever there was one. Blake Morrison, writing in The Guardian, says -

In the end, all landscapes in literature, however well known to or diligently researched by the author, are invented landscapes. Their hills and valleys may have a basis in fact, but the novelist adds his own gradients.

That’s very true as well, and it’s not just in literature that we invent our landscapes, nor just landscapes that invite invention. Megaliths and (ancient) sites invite a plethora of invention – their very abstractness calls out to be filled with one fleeting feeling or theory after another. Even archaeologists are not immune to the lure of invention, but at least most of the time their feet are on the ground (or in it) and a picture of what might have been slowly emerges... maybe.

Morrison above mentions Edward Thomas’ poem Lob -

And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was,
My memory could not decide, because
There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.
All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres...

Aye, that’s true as well; it’s all ‘hitched to everything else in the universe’ - real, true, imagined, invented or otherwise...
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