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Chapter Nine
‘Where lives converge’: Peter Riley and the Poetics
of Place
Neal Alexander
Peter Riley is a poet deeply engaged with the poetics of
place, producing representations of landscape that are at once
learned, reflexive, and rich with the details of sensuous
experience. Walking frequently serves his narrators as a means
of phenomenological immersion and performative enactment,
though a dense weight of research into the history, geography,
and geology of his chosen loci is discernable between or
behind the lines, as are a profusion of playful intertextual
dialogues. Specific places provide both creative impetus and a
thematic focal point in texts from across Riley’s large and
diverse ouevre; as Simon Perril remarks, his poetry ‘has
rigourously anchored itself in place and landscape.’1 For
instance, the sequence, Sea Watches (1991), is set almost
1 Simon Perryl, ‘Trapqings of the Hart: Reader and the Ballad of The English
Hntelligencer’, The Gig 4/5:(The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 197.
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entirely on the Llŷn Peninsula in north-west Wales – as are a
number of related poems – and is accompanied by detailed
‘Topographical Notes’ explaining the historical, cultural,
religious, and personal significance of places depicted in the
poem.2 Another sequence, Noon Province, unfolds among the
villages, hillsides, and field margins of Provence, Southern
France, whilst other poems from the collection A Map of Faring
(2005) are prompted by locations in Romania, Austria, the
Czech Republic, Italy, and Spain.3 By far the most important
cluster of places with which Riley’s poetry engages, however,
are to be found in the Peak District and its surrounding
edgelands, where Riley lived for more than ten years in the
1970s and 1980s. In this essay I want to offer a detailed
reading of his long poem, Alstonefield (2003), in which the
writing of place is pursued through the familiar trope of
walking in the landscape. I will examine how the dynamics of2 Peter RiLey, Sea Watches (Kenilworth: Prest Roots Press, 1995). Alì of
Riley’s works respondmng to tie Llŷn0Peၮ inswla are cOlleɣted in Tɨe Llŷn
Wsitings (хxete: Shearѳman200Books, 2007)ၮ
3 Peter Riìၮù, A Map of Faring (WɥsŴ#Lafayåtte: Tarlor Press. 200ၮ). Noၮn
Pzovince is reprinted in its entirety in this volume.
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settlement and locomotion in Riley’s text inform its
digressive reflection on the place-bound character of lyric
subjectivity, which in turn opens onto a critical dialogue
with the conventions and legacies of the pastoral mode. Eric
Falci argues that Riley’s ‘continuing series of Midland and
Northern topographies […] may end up constituting the most
significant engagement with location and landscape in
twentieth-century British poetry.’4 It is not my intention to
prove or disprove the validity of this claim, which is in any
case deliberately hedged in the conditional tense. However, I
do proceed on the assumption that Alstonefield constitutes Riley’s
most sustained and successful engagement with the poetics of
place to date, and is among the most accomplished examples of
contemporary landscape poetry.
Riley’s longstanding involvement in small press
publishing and association with the Cambridge School of avant-
gardist poetry has tended to assign him a place on the margins
of contemporary British poetry.5 He is well-represented in
those anthologies that define themselves in opposition to the
4 Eric Falci, ‘Place, Space, and Landscape’, in Nigel Alderman and C.D.
Blanton, eds, A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), p. 208.
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poetic ‘mainstream’, such as Andrew Crozier and Tim
Longville’s A Various Art (1987) and Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of
Chaos (1996), and has received critical recognition within the
experimental poetry scene, but is otherwise overlooked if not
ignored.6 Keith Tuma suggests that Riley ‘might be thought of
as a late modernist’, as he is a writer who regards the poem
as ‘an unpredictable, mysterious, but altogether self-
contained artifact, the relationship of poet to poem as
5 Nigel Wheale observes that for over three decades Riley has made ‘an
important contribution to informal networks and alliances for writing in
the U.K., Europe, and America, first as a poet, but also as an editor,
publisher, translator, conference organiser, and not least, as the best-
informed distribution centre in the U.K. for new poetry in his day-job as
bookseller.’ Nigel Wheale, ‘Breaking cover: Peter Riley’s Passing Measures,’
Chicago Review 47, 1 (2001), p. 111.
6 Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, eds, A Various Art (London: Paladin, 1987),
pp. 299-329; Iain Sinclair, ed., Conductors of Chaos (London: Picador, 1996),
pp. 402-12. See also Gillian Allnutt et al., eds, The New British Poetry 1986-88
(London: Paladin, 1988), pp. 240-44; Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain,
eds, Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press, 1999), pp. 218-22; Keith Tuma, ed., Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and
Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 674-80; Rod Mengham
and John Kinsella, eds, Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Cambridge: Salt,
2004), pp. 222-9.
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“impersonal”.’7 Perhaps this description overplays the
‘difficulty’ of Riley’s poetry a little, for whilst it
displays rapid shifts between discourses, registers, and
idioms, and often makes use of composite or ‘open’ forms,
Riley’s work is rarely so ‘self-contained’ as Tuma implies.
Certainly, it is less forbiddingly hermetic than that of his
Cambridge contemporary J.H. Prynne, and less self-consciously
‘radical’ than that of John Wilkinson, Keston Sutherland, or
Maggie O’Sullivan.
This much is made clear by Riley himself, who describes
the relationship between a poem and its readers in the
following terms:
The poem can be conceived as an object between poet and
reader which is both a means of communication and a
barrier to communication. It is neither opaque nor
transparent. Things are seen through it only by being
seen in it, therefore with greater or lesser degrees of
faceting, distortion, isolation, association, reflection,
clarity.8
7 Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American
Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 221, 220.
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Clearly, a certain neo-modernist interest in the suspension or
‘distortion’ of meaning is evident here, and poetic language
is granted its capacity to obstruct understanding as much as
to facilitate it. Yet, poetry is also conceived as a vehicle
for communication that can aspire to a degree of ‘clarity’;
and if it is never wholly ‘transparent’ then neither is it
ever entirely ‘opaque’. The poem, Riley goes on to say, is
‘constructed out of paradoxical or conflicting motivations
within a tradition’, and this calls for an active role on the
part of the reader, who must follow or forge associations and
recognise the transformations wrought on experience by
language.9 What is also distinctive about Riley’s work is his
eschewal of the apparent opposition between a poetic
‘mainstream’ on the one hand, and a neo-modernist avant-garde
on the other. In an interview conducted in 1983 he affirms his
place in relation to ‘an entire climate’ of English poetry
rather than any particular faction; and more recently he has
laid claim to a notional ‘middle ground’ between the
mainstream and the avant-garde, saying: ‘What I do is like a
8 Peter Riley, ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’, in Denise Riley, ed.,
Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-1991 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 93.
9 Riley, ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’, p. 99.
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balancing trick, a ridge-top walk. I want to keep in view all
the possibilities, which are not just left and right, and kind
of steer a course through them.’10 The telling metaphor of the
ridge-top walk in this passage chimes appropriately with the
topography and procedures of Alstonefield, which performs its own
formal and stylistic balancing tricks, steering beyond ‘the
small poetry/ world, where fleas scratch cats.’11
The Peak District itself might be thought of as a kind of
‘middle ground’ located between the English midlands and the
industrial North, at the Southern end of the Pennine
moorlands; an area of upland pastures and wild bogs, rocky
tors and meandering river valleys, encircled by urban
conurbations and arterial transport routes. Riley registers
such ambivalences in Lines on the Liver when he describes the White
Peak, an area of carboniferous limestone that makes up the
Southern half of the National Park, as ‘a dome of ore-bearing10 Kelvin Corcoran, ‘Spitewinter Provocations: An Interview on the Condition
of Poetry with Peter Riley’, Reality Studios 8 (1986), p. 14; Keith Tuma, ‘An
Interview with Peter Riley’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p.
11.
11 Peter Riley, Alstonefield: A poem (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), p. 26. All
further references to this volume will be given parenthetically in the
text.
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shellmass, a white capsule of sedimentary patience’ surrounded
by ‘the magno-industrial parks and wastelands of a false and
hollow certainty’.12 A keen awareness of the interpenetrations
of natural, agricultural, urban, and industrial spaces
characterises Riley’s representations of the Peak District,
which is depicted both as a counter-site at odds with the
excesses of late capitalist modernity and a landscape that is
ineluctably shaped by and implicated in those very forces.
According to Yi-Fu Tuan, one function of literary texts
is ‘to give visibility to intimate experiences, including
those of place’ especially by illuminating certain
‘inconspicuous fields of human care’ that might otherwise
escape our notice.13 This seems to describe an important
impetus for Riley’s poem. Alstonefield is a village situated
in the North Staffordshire Peak District on the limestone
12 Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver (London: Ferry Press, 1981), p. 3. Please note
that Lines on the Liver is unpaginated; my numbering counts from the first page
of the main text. This volume has recently been republished, along with
Tracks and Mineshafts (1983), as The Derbyshire Poems, though Riley has revised the
wording of the passage cited. See Peter Riley, The Derbyshire Poems (Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2010), p. 99.
13 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 162.
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uplands between the valleys of the rivers Dove and Manifold,
an area that was historically associated with the mining of
copper and lead but is now largely given over to sheep-farming
and the leisure and tourism industries. The very ordinariness
of this location is clearly part of its attraction.14 Yet, in
Riley’s text Alstonefield’s ordinariness also consists in its
being an example of what Doreen Massey calls ‘meeting places’,
by which she means places as points of intersection for much
larger, potentially global, networks of social and spatial
relations. The specificity of place is thus not intrinsic or
essential, but ‘derives from the fact that each place is the
focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social
relations.’15 Alstonefield may seem remote from the effects of
globalisation and the metropolitan world of capital flows and
international politics, but actually derives its sense of
place through its relations with a multitude of elsewheres.
Riley highlights this point himself when he notes that14 In interview, Riley has said that the ‘everyday’ or the ‘ordinary’ is ‘a
zone that was always free of […] cultural militarism’ and therefore
something that his work seeks ‘to preserve intact as a productive space’.
Tuma, ‘An Interview with Peter Riley,’ p. 15.
15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp.
154, 156.
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Alstonefield is a place of contraries, a ‘labyrinth’ (1) where
nothing ‘is quite itself’:
An upland pastoral community run by machines; a weekend
break zone for the wild soul which betrays refused
planning permission at every turn; sublimity locked into
sordidness on the high pastures, elegance and care
struggling with cynical exploitation in the valleys … (2)
As a working landscape, the area is inevitably plugged into
the technologies of modern agriculture and its status as a
‘weekend break zone’ implies reliance on an affluent
population which happens to live elsewhere. Consequently,
landscapes of pastoral beauty and post-Romantic sublimity co-
exist awkwardly with those of ‘sordidness’ and ‘cynical
exploitation’, and in both cases the sedimentation of cultural
assumptions about such landscapes is acknowledged.
Riley initially published a shorter, four-part version of
Alstonefield in 1995.16 The expanded 2003 version, on which I will
concentrate, features a lengthy fifth part in which the
narrator undertakes a long, circuitous night walk through the
surrounding landscape, though it retains the original’s ten-
16 Peter Riley, Alstonefield: Stanzas unfinished (London/Plymouth: Oasis/Shearsman,
1995).
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line stanza form and meditative, digressive narrative voice.
Alstonefield is also a densely ‘loco-specific’ text, mapping its
concerns and imagery not only in relation to the villages,
hills, and dales that most obviously mark the area’s
topography, but also naming farms, houses, pathways, tumuli,
and geological features in a manner that suggests both deep
local knowledge and scrupulous topographical exactitude.17
Riley’s poem implies that place is crucial to our experiences
of being and becoming, that identities are performed in places
just as places are in turn shaped by the imprints of human
identities. Or, as Jeff Malpas has it, ‘the structure of
subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place.’18
The poem’s narrator, clearly a version of Riley himself, is
described as a ‘wandering, and suitably impoverished,
17 I adapt the term ‘loco-specific’ from Peter Barry’s discussion of
contemporary urban poetry, where he makes a broad distinction between
‘setting’, by which he means generic indicators of location, and
‘geography’, which entails a much more specific rendering of particular
places identified by acts of naming and detailed description. Peter Barry,
Contemporary British poetry and the city (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), pp. 48-9.
18 J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 35.
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definitely proletarian, pastoral or pasteurised, writing
person’ (3). Yet, the attempt to write place is never purely
solipsistic but also social, as it entails tuning into how
others have seen and experienced the landscape as well as
articulating one’s own impressions. Consequently, Riley’s
intensely reflexive search for the ‘meaning’ of Alstonefield
‘also discloses the limits of personal poetry’ (3), calling
the unity and coherence of the lyric subject into question.
Indeed, his speaker pointedly addresses some fundamental split
in selfhood when he speaks of ‘an abandoned centre’ ‘where/ we
live, I and I’ (18), and goes on to suppose the possibility of
‘a selfless self’ (43). Such strategies indicate Riley’s
affinities with the neo-modernist avant-garde, which, as Drew
Milne remarks, has ‘tended to fragment and disrupt assumptions
about the authority of subjectivity’; though Peter Robinson is
right to note that, rather than abandoning the lyric ‘I’
altogether, ‘Riley writes with the specified aim of
reinstating the singular subject, anxieties and all.’19
19 Drew Milne, ‘Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations’, in Alderman and
Blanton, eds, A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, p. 156; Peter
Robinson, ‘On Untitled Sequence’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p.
70.
211
Identity and subjectivity are both affirmed and problematised
through their relations to place in Alstonefield, and Riley
describes his text as ‘an interlinear commentary’ (2) that
derives its form from the geology of the landscape it
represents. As Tony Baker observes, Riley’s poem evinces a
‘geological attention’ to ‘manifold strata’ in its
representations of place and landscape.20 Indeed, person,
place, and poem are each imagined in terms of multiple strata
and accretions that mediate between surface and core: ‘Because
it is a sedimentary landscape, however distorted in the
details of the disrupted surface: the horizontal successions
of settling fundamentals underpin everything you see, layer
upon layer’ (4). Like the landscape itself, the text is a
palimpsest of folded and partially eroded layers that are each
permeated with the various historical, social, topographical,
and personal meanings of place.
Another of the recurrent tropes through which Riley
imagines place is that of convergence, an idea that is capable
of succinctly sketching in the proliferating relations whereby
20 Tony Baker, ‘A Démarrage, a Letter and a Postscript, Concerning (Mostly)
Peter Riley’s Alstonefield’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 175-
6.
212
apparently distinct and bounded places are in fact integrated
into wider spatial networks.21 Thus, in Part III of Alstonefield,
the narrator watches a ‘mountain edge’ emerging from mist or
low cloud:
Surface that is a line hanging in the air
at which sight withdraws, a clarity on paper
anterior to the earth, broken by ink.
Lines that converge without touching
open centrally to a linen distance,
the whole air a time table. (15)
In this rather stark depiction of landscape details and
colours have been dissolved by the weather so that the fields
resemble a linen tablecloth on which a geometrical pattern of
lines stand out, converging but seeming never to meet. On one
level, these lines denote the ‘geometry of stone walls’ that
is a distinctive feature of the topography of the White Peak,
marking out the various property boundaries and spatial
divisions of the landscape as ‘parallelograms and asymptotic
curves’ (4). On another, they refer self-reflexively to the
21 Peter Larkin discovers a ‘geography of convergence’ informing Riley’s
earlier sequence, Sea Watches. Peter Larkin, ‘Sea Watches: Little More than
Arrival’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 117.
213
lines of the poem itself, for this bleached landscape is also
depicted via the metaphor of a white page ‘broken by ink’.
Moreover, the play of ‘clarity’ and obscurity that informs
this scene accords well with Riley’s views on the simultaneous
transparency and opacity of the poetic text, for the reader
struggles to trace the lineaments of place through a fog of
uncertain significations.
The trope of convergence or intersection also informs the
‘enclosure’ depicted in the poem’s opening stanzas, which
figures less as a bounded space than as a meeting place for
disparate thoughts, memories, and associations: ‘Every
impossible meeting/ happens here in darkness and silence/ and
the slightness of the piecing mind’ (6). As a result, the
speaker’s contemplation of Alstonefield as a particular place
leads him to intuit its connections with other places: with
‘distances steeped in petrol’ (6), ‘the spectral/ city’ (10),
and his home in distant Cambridge (11). Later, in Section V,
he follows such connections in the opposite direction,
contemplating a series of possible journeys that would radiate
outwards from Alstonefield along the cardinal points of the
compass: North to the ‘steelworks’ and ‘silver moors’ of
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Yorkshire; West towards Stoke-on-Trent and the Staffordshire
plains; East to the ‘great keep’ of Lincoln; and South towards
‘the heart of smooth success’ (24-5). The effect of this
passage is, of course, to stress the linkages between
Alstonefield and the urban centres that encircle it, and so to
strengthen the sense of places as, in Massey’s terms,
‘heterogeneous associations’, nodes of intersection and
disconnection in more expansive spatial relays.22 Indeed, one
of Riley’s most succinct definitions of place is ‘[w]here
lives converge’ (20, 22), and towards the end of Part IV he
writes: ‘I find/ walking back to the guest house with my/
companion to hand the god tracks converge’ (22). These lines
not only depict place as a nexus of affective and social
relations but also enact the convergence of conversational and
mythopoeic registers, empirical reality and potent fiction.
That Riley’s speaker is so frequently depicted returning
to or setting out from his guest house reminds the reader that
his apprehensions of place are inflected by his status as a
transient visitor rather than a resident. However, Riley did
live in the vicinity of Alstonefield at a house called
Harecops, about two miles to the north of the village, for22 Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 137.
215
several years during the 1970s. In Alstonefield his narrator
passes this former home a number of times, prompting the
intertwining of memories and present actions on each occasion.
Consider, for example, the following passage from Part V:
Boletus
flourish at
certain times of the year in the wood over to the left.
I remember this from when I lived here. That move
into the entire land when a couple becomes
a family, that optimism, took place in the big
stone house over there. (49)
The discursive, autobiographical register employed here
facilitates Riley’s subtle conjunction of different
temporalities, as present engagements with the landscape shade
into a range of emplaced memories. The faintly nostalgic image
of the remembered family home is sharpened by the contrast
made with the speaker’s current solitude, and the passage as a
whole underlines the fact that Riley’s narrator is not
encountering this place for the first time but rediscovering
it and sifting its various layers of significance. In this
way, Alstonefield exemplifies Peter Middleton and Tim Woods’s
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point that places are ‘loci of memory; reference points of
narratives, propositions and emotions; signs of the passing of
time and the histories that mark it.’23 In a sense, all places
are over-inscribed with past associations that must be
interpreted anew each time they are encountered.
Riley has long been concerned with ideas of settlement
and dwelling, even when the poetry itself has tended to be
markedly unsettled, even restlessly peripatetic. The central
image of his early poem, ‘Material Soul’, describes a moment
of insight where ‘perception opens/ to a cleared space, a
settlement, holding/ people of all ages together’; and in
‘Driving up the Erewash and Arriving’ the speaker imagines
‘peace’ as ‘a space to which/ everyone had perfect right of
access’.24 What is clear in both cases is that Riley associates
the idea of being-in-place with the principles of equality and
inclusivity that would foster a democratic community. Of
course, the very idea of settlement also implies layers of
experience, the accrued histories of lives lived together in
23 Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, time and space in
postwar writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 277.
24 Peter Riley, Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000),
pp. 13, 19.
217
place, as Riley makes clear in the closing image of Part IV of
Alstonefield. The village’s limestone houses ‘stand there like
gravestones century after/ century’, offering a sense of
permanence as ‘individuals and families pass/ through them and
out, each making a more/ or less hearted wrapper of the
inside’ (22). The simile that likens houses to ‘gravestones’
seems to imply that death is as much a part of such
communities as life; a sombre enough reflection. More
importantly, though, the central notion of individuals
‘pass[ing]/ through’ houses that both outlast them and are
inevitably shaped by their lives – an idea reinforced by the
telling use of enjambment in ‘century after/ century’ –
illustrates the mixture of transience and continuity that
informs Riley’s sense of place.
Alstonefield also develops a distinctly peripatetic
aesthetic, particularly in its lengthy final part, employing
the trope of walking as the text’s primary means of
experiencing and recording the meanings of place. This
emphasis upon movement and shifting perspectives is essential
to what Malpas describes as a ‘topographical’ delineation of
place. By this he means ‘a process that encompasses a variety
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of sightings from a number of conceptual ‘landmarks’ and that
also undertakes a wide-ranging, criss-crossing set of journeys
over the landscape at issue – it is only through such
journeying, sighting and resighting that place can be
understood.’25 The embodied subject moving through the
landscape is able to register the rich phenomenological
dimensions of place because of her immersion in it, and
walking also promotes a thoughtful, meditative relation
between the self and the world. As Rebecca Solnit remarks,
walking ideally manifests itself as ‘a state in which the
mind, the body, and the world are aligned’; although, if this
implies harmony and balance, then as a literary trope ‘the
recounted walk encourages digression and association’,
rambling in both material and metaphorical senses.26 Indeed,
Riley has described Alstonefield as ‘a written ramble referring to
an actual one’, and the poem seems to elaborate his desire to
‘track the earth’, or to make tracks upon it.27 Walking25 Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 41.
26 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 5,
21.
27 Todd Nathan Thorpe, ‘Peter Riley in conversation,’ Jacket 35 (2008)
<http://jacketmagazine.com/35/iv-peter-riley-ivb-thorpe.shtml> [Accessed 4
Jan 2012]; in ‘Prelude’, Riley’s speaker asks: ‘if we weren’t in the dark
219
provides his ambulant narrator with a means of practising
place by negotiating the manifold paths and intersecting
routes that traverse the surface of the landscape. Such
practices of negotiation and inscription are integral to the
production of social space, as Henri Lefebvre observes:
‘Traversed now by pathways and patterned by networks, natural
space changes: one might say that practical activity writes
upon nature, albeit in a scrawling hand, and that this writing
implies a particular representation of space. Places are
marked, noted, named.’28 The activities of marking, noting, and
naming are all prominent in Alstonefield; but if walking can be
understood as a means of reading or writing (on) the landscape
then it also parallels the experience of the reader attempting
to follow the meandering, divagating, and often disorientating
lines taken by Riley’s poem. As Riley’s narrator at one point
observes: ‘Long reaches/ and very difficult breaks are, with
practice,/ traversed, walked, passed alongside’ (28). Once
again, place and poem, landscape and written text mirror one
star’s way would our sense/ still track the earth whether we knew it or
not?’ Riley, Passing Measures, p. 14.
28 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 117-18.
220
another without ever quite collapsing the distinction between
material spaces and their representations.
That much of the walking in Alstonefield takes place at night
is also significant, for, as Robert Macfarlane observes, night
walking can radically alter the nature of one’s engagement
with place: ‘At night, new orders of connection assert
themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is
transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You
become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a
mingling of geology, memory, movement, life.’29 Similarly, as
Riley’s narrator wanders half-purposefully through a landscape
defamiliarised by darkness and moonlight, the poem braids
together a set of diverse concerns with topography and
history, physical sensation and the natural world, as well as
meditations on memory and loss. ‘This walk/ is a night walk of
the world where horizons/ meet’ (31), he says, making further
use of the idea of convergences in space and time. The same
figure is developed further when the speaker’s own ‘night-long
trudge’ (38) comes to be paralleled by those of the souls of
the dead, whom he imagines wandering the adjacent upland
meadows:29 Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Granta Books, 2007), p. 193.
221
Though time
destroy the person, the intent shall range
the upper levels while mortals sleep, and
patiently, patiently, think-tread the fields,
coaxing lasting peace formulae out of bitter grass. (35)
The notion of ‘think-treading’ that is introduced in these
lines parallels the act of physical locomotion with the
motions of the wandering, free-associating mind, just as the
central conceit shows the horizons of the living and the dead
meeting and intersecting.
Riley’s nocturnal ramble is unusual in its rural setting,
for as a literary trope the night walk has a much stronger
pedigree in urban writing from Thomas de Quincey through
Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to Thomas
Kinsella.30 As if nodding towards this tradition, Riley’s
narrator refers to himself as an ‘experienced/ city pavement
walker’ (28), imaginatively conflating street-walking with his30 On the fragmentary tradition of the literary night walk see Jeffrey C.
Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1989), pp. 77-87. Kinsella’s poem ‘Nightwalker’ escapes Robinson’s
notice – as does Joyce’s Ulysses – but is an important post-war example. See
Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956-2001 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), pp.
76-84.
222
perambulations of the dales. One non-urban precedent is Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s account of his moonlit trek across the
ridges of Helvellyn to the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere in
August 1800.31 Another exemplar is Ivor Gurney, who as a young
man ‘would go for long walks, sometimes stopping out all night
– sleeping, perhaps, under the stars or in some friendly
barn’, experiences that are frequently recorded or reworked in
his poems.32 Indeed, Riley’s narrator explicitly identifies
with Gurney late in his walk, saying: ‘I felt like Ivor
Gurney, to whom walking/ was a necessary music, audible in
darkness,/ eating the miles, consuming the place’ (82). This
notion of walking as ‘a necessary music’, heard in darkness
when vision is impaired, recalls Gurney’s dual role as poet
and composer. It also chimes with Riley’s own extensive
31 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp.
281-2. I am grateful to David Cooper for bringing this example to my
attention.
32 Michael Hurd, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 25. See also, amongst others, ‘Glimmering Dusk’, ‘Darkness Has
Cheating Swiftness’, ‘Walking Song’, ‘Cotswold Ways’, ‘Fragment’, ‘On the
Night’, ‘Wandering Thoughts’, and ‘Dawns I Have Seen’ in Ivor Gurney,
Collected Poems ed., P.J. Kavanagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
pp. 79, 81, 95-6, 103, 111, 131, 191.
223
allusions to music throughout Alstonefield, which range from
classical oratorios to Transylvanian ‘dawn songs’ and African
polyphonic singing.33
If, as J. Hillis Miller holds, every narrative ‘traces
out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings, and
rooms joined by paths and roads’ then we map these
arrangements in our readings of the text.34 Certainly, because
of its density of topographical reference, the circular route
taken by Riley’s narrator in Part V of Alstonefield can be mapped
with some accuracy. Following a wet Sunday spent exploring the
barrows at Pea Low and Gratton Hill, he sets out from the
village pub, The George Inn, and heads North-East to the Dove
Valley, crossing the river by a footbridge below Cold Eaton.
He then follows the winding riverside path up Wolfscote Dale
as far as the mouth of Beresford Dale before moving West past
Barrack Farm and Harecops, crossing Archford Moor, and
reaching the neck of the Manifold Valley near Ecton. Something
33 On the use of musical allusions in Riley’s work, see Mark Morrison,
‘Peter Riley’s Author: Musical Allusion and the “Climate of Possibility”’,
The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 139-62.
34 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), p. 10.
224
odd happens at this point, for Riley’s narrator spontaneously
‘divide[s] into two travellers’ (59), one of whom walks the
snaking but level path by the River Manifold whilst the other
bears left over the windy ridge of Ecton Hill, formerly the
site of an extensive copper mining industry.35 These two
walking selves meet and merge again at Wetton Mill, from where
Riley’s narrator continues South along the river to a weir, at
which point he strikes out Eastwards towards Alstonefield via
Long Low and Hope Dale, finishing his night-long walk in the
murky light of dawn. As this brief summary suggests, Riley’s
loco-specific depictions convey a rich sense of local detail
and phenomenological ‘implacement’.36 Yet the erratic,
wandering thoughts and imaginings of his narrator also work to
sketch in, however fleetingly or fancifully, Alstonefield’s
35 On mining at Ecton Hill, see Riley’s note (107); John Barnatt and Ken
Smith, The Peak District: Landscapes Through Time (Macclesfield: Windgather Press,
2004), pp. 116-17; and John A. Robey and Lindsey Porter, The Copper and Lead
Mines of Ecton Hill, Staffordshire (Leek: Moorland Publishing, 1972).
36 The term ‘implacement’ is Edward Casey’s and refers to the experience of
being concretely placed so that ‘actual occasions’ are bound ‘into unique
collocations of space and time.’ Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Towards
a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993), p. 23.
225
relations to a much broader spectrum of places. These include:
Cambridge (26, 68, 79), Manchester (27, 28, 38, 82), Poland
(29), Derby (42), Mozambique (42, 91), Donegal (45), Zaïre
(58), Durban (78, 80), Dallas (87), Leeds (88), Korea (88),
and Louisiana (98). The arrangement of places that Riley
constructs in Alstonefield therefore articulates the relations of
place through a complex interdigitation of spatial scales that
vary from the intimately local to the global.
An implicit politics informs this apparently incongruous
collocation of proximate and distant places; indeed, Keston
Sutherland describes Riley as ‘a committed, thoughtful
democrat’.37 Riley’s democratic humanism suffuses much of
Alstonefield, but is particularly apparent in two passages where
past, present, and future, here and elsewhere become
interwoven. The first occurs when his narrator is leaving the
Dove Valley to move West across open country and pauses to
look down on what he calls ‘the oval meadow’, a place in
Wolfscote Dale that is repeatedly referred and returned to in
the poem. On this occasion, the narrator’s imagination
transforms this undistinguished river meadow into an urban
37 Keston Sutherland, ‘The Accomplishment of Knowing One’s Place’, The Gig 4/5:
The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 138.
226
public space, ‘a Piazza del Populo’ in which ‘there’s both
time and need/ for democracy’ (44). This fantastic, utopian
vision soon begins to blur and fade, but seems to resonate
with his earlier self-description as ‘a person un-/ curfewed,
a citizen not a subject’ making his way in ‘plural space’
(43). In any case, the narrator’s nocturnal vision leaves a
lingering after-image that situates an ideal of Italian
republicanism in the landscapes of the White Peak: ‘A public
space, a meeting place/ of conflicting hearts on limestone
paving’ (45). Here again, the trope of convergence suffuses
and enriches Riley’s imaginative representations of place. The
second example occurs whilst one of the narrator’s split
selves is passing over Ecton Hill, a place that still bears
the marks of its history as a centre for copper mining but is
now largely forsaken and haunted by ‘industrial echoes’ (59).
Indeed, at one point, Riley’s protagonist thinks he hears a
chorus of voices booming out from the hollow ground beneath
his feet: ‘Dead miners/ carolling under the hill’ (63).
Subsequently, these concerns modulate into an oblique elegy
227
for the lost mining communities of the region and a satirical
critique of Thatcherite economic and social policies:38
Public good translates as business interests there is
a strange sense of déjà-vu as we creep home, and
the economy is saved, hoorah. But the economy
is not what we live, the economy is our enemy […]. (74)
This exposure of an underlying subtext to political rhetoric
is typical of much of Riley’s work, but so too is the mixture
of wry humour and serious-minded defiance that we see here.
The (perhaps over-simplistic) opposition between free market
economics and ‘life’ developed in these lines is reinforced
subsequently, when Riley’s narrator affirms: ‘We refuse to
die/ into this economy’ (74). At the same time, though, he
recognises his own culpability and acquiescence in the
political status quo, for he is, like everyone else, ‘crouched
38 Peter Middleton notes the importance of the industrial disputes and
miners’ strikes of the early 1980s as a context for Riley’s earlier Peak
District collection, Tracks and Mineshafts. Peter Middleton, ‘The Substance of
Tracks and Mineshafts’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 54-6.
Similarly, John Hall argues that in Riley’s work of the 1980s mining and
dreaming are the primary metaphors, and ‘the miner becomes a figure of the
self, economically, ontologically’. Hall, ‘On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and
Mineshafts,’ p. 36.
228
against threat, paying the lords, waiting/ centuries for a
democracy that never arrives’ (79). A just and equitable
political order haunts Riley’s imagination throughout
Alstonefield, which vacillates between dejected realism and
utopian longing, addressing ‘the world/ in its hope’ (8).
As the examples of the piazza in the dales and the choir
of dead miners illustrate, Riley’s free-associating
meditations and ‘sleepless hermeneutics’ can often take on the
hallucinatory colouring of surreal fantasy; as, for example,
when his narrator dances in the moonlight with a giant rabbit
(38-9) or converses with the ghost of Shostakovich (46-9).39 He
also has encounters with, amongst others, an inquisitorial
sphinx (79), a clump of singing hawthorn bushes (84-7), and
the ominous ‘knight in the road’ from an old German ballad
(95-6). These episodes demonstrate Riley’s willingness to
blend reality and dream, the concrete and the abstract, the
philosophical and the humourous, although such techniques are
also shadowed by the dangers of flippancy and irrelevance, as
he seems to recognise. During the scene with the rabbit,
Riley’s narrator makes a point of pulling himself up short:
39 John Hall, ‘Before you Fall: Postlude on a Prelude’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of
Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 44.
229
‘Look, this is a serious poem why am I/ waltzing with a
mammal?’ (39). Of course, there is a certain smug
sophistication in such knowing self-reflexivity, but a more
serious purpose informing these passages is Riley’s desire to
convey a sense of the random slippages of context and sense
that are made possible by a weary but active mind.
Something slightly different seems to be happening,
however, in those passages of the text in which Alstonefield
is populated by gods and goddesses, the manifest presences of
a genius loci. In Part II, Riley’s speaker exclaims: ‘Now I
sleep in Alstonefield. Gods and goddesses/ walk in the dark
fields and stand in a ring in the/ churchyard waiting for
light’ (11). A little later on, these figures return and are
pictured ‘strolling the fields waiting for dawn’ (32), making
their own ‘god-tracks’ (22) by walking the landscape. The
poem’s conception of place as a site of convergence between
different orders of being seems to owe more than a little to
the late thought of Martin Heidegger, both his notion that
‘earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness
into things’ through the condition of dwelling and his
enigmatic observation that: ‘To be a poet in a destitute time
230
means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive
gods.’40 Yet, whilst Riley’s attentiveness to the
phenomenological involvements of the body in its environments
does seem to align Alstonefield with what John Wylie calls ‘the
dwelling perspective’ of landscape writing, the peripatetic
restlessness and repeated decentring of the perceiving subject
that his text enacts ultimately disavows Heidegger’s notion of
an organic grounding in place.41 Indeed, as we have seen, place
is ultimately neither bounded nor stable in Alstonefield, but is
rather a point of convergence for many disparate narratives,
processes, and relations, a meeting place within far-flung
socio-spatial networks. Riley has said of the ‘religious’
vocabulary his poetry employs that it ‘remains valid as indeed
it remains in common parlance, while the religious structures
fall into dereliction.’42 Similarly, Alstonefield’s ‘god-tracks’
need not be regarded as the transcendent means by which heaven40 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ and ‘What Are Poets
For?,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper
Collins, 2001), pp. 157, 92.
41 John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 158. See also Tim
Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill (London:
Routledge, 2000).
42 Tuma, ‘An Interview with Peter Riley’, p. 15.
231
and earth are joined but rather as a highly charged variant of
the many material paths, tracks, and ways that record the
social and symbolic meanings of place in the poem.
Nonetheless, some intimation of the numinous inevitably
attaches to Riley’s use of such mythopoeic imagery, and his
recurrent tendency to associate Alstonefield with a belief in
‘peace, messy and running-failed as it is’ (2) aligns the text
with a long tradition of pastoral depictions of place. Tom
Lowenstein notes that in the 1995 version of Alstonefield Riley’s
impulse is ‘to explore or reconstruct a midlands pastoral’;
and Simon Perril comments on his frequent dalliances with ‘the
lyric and pastoral modes’.43 Of course, it has been argued that
‘pastoral landscapes’ in the strict sense are those in which
herdsmen or their equivalents provide the focus of attention.44
But if we grant the term its wider resonances with the
cultural construction of nature and celebrations of rural
retreats then its application to Riley’s work seems
43 Tom Lowenstein, ‘Excavation and Contemplation: Peter Riley’s Distant
Points’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 186; Perril, ‘Trappings
of the Hart’, p. 217.
44 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996), pp. 27-8.
232
appropriate. Adopting this approach, Andrew Lawson links
Riley’s work, and that of several other Cambridge poets, to
the emergence of a distinctive expression of modern pastoral
that provides a sophisticated but ultimately familiar ‘form of
nostalgia: for small artisan cultures.’ The distinguishing
features of this ‘philosophical pastoral’ include a tendency
to lament the lack of any genuine community in contemporary
Britain and a conception of history as ‘a frozen space of
passivity and resignation’.45 There are elements of Riley’s
Alstonefield that seem to fit this general description, as when he
associates the landscapes around Alstonefield with a fragile
but enduring spirit of ‘hope’: ‘A deific glow that scutters
out of sight when you turn to face it, but integral to the
entire geology’ (4). Indeed, the poem might also be read in
the context of much older traditions of pastoral writing.
Raymond Williams notes that a key trope of pastoral writing
entails contrasting ‘the peace of country life’ with ‘the
disturbance of war and civil war and the political chaos of
the cities.’46 A weaker version of this contrast is apparent at
45 Andrew Lawson, ‘On Modern Pastoral’, fragmente 3 (1991), pp. 41, 39.
46 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1993),
p. 17.
233
the moment in which Riley’s narrator thinks of Cambridge from
the geographical and emotional distance of Alstonefield: ‘It
was my wine to rest by the stone wall at/ summer’s end far
from Cambridge, where/ chthonic severance dictates endless
toil’ (11). That telling phrase, ‘chthonic severance’, implies
that returning to Alstonefield is a means by which Riley’s
narrator can reconnect with the earth at a precious distance
from the urban cares of alienated labour. In these ways, then,
Alstonefield can sometimes appear to take up ‘the discourse of
retreat’ that Terry Gifford sees as central to the
ambivalences of pastoral writing.47
Yet, if Riley often represents place through the
discourse and conventions of pastoral, he typically does so in
a highly self-conscious manner that is notably critical of the
very conventions he employs. For instance, whilst the narrator
of Alstonefield is half-humourously concerned about the ability of
certain valued places to withstand the ‘desubstantiating/
forces known collectively as shopping’ (20), his handling of
pastoral iconography is also profoundly ironic. At the opening
of Part V he visits a car boot sale in the village and fails
to be seduced by a representative figure:47 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 46.
234
Dampening, I turn down
a plastic shepherdess at 30p and go back
to the car. And sit waiting in the rain
for something better than pastoral, some-
thing less fairground and more circus […]. (24)
The plastic shepherdess seems to imply an unexpected
congruence between traditional pastoral motifs and the ‘image
destitution’ (24) wrought by consumer capitalism, whilst the
speaker’s stated desire for ‘something better than pastoral’
is rendered ambiguous by the fact that it is expressed as he
sits in his car, itself an icon of technological modernity. Of
course, the car goes nowhere, is merely a shelter from the
rain, and the narrator’s earlier remark that ‘Petrol flips the
work-day whip/ and we poor peasants dive for the verge’ (23)
accords with the text’s perambulatory bias. Nonetheless, his
self-identification as one of those ‘poor peasants’ harried by
the pace of contemporary living is clearly also ironic,
highlighting the discrepancy between pastoral tropes and
observable conditions in typical anti-pastoral style.48 At the
48 Anti-pastoral can take a number of forms, but they all share the intent
to expose ‘the distance between reality and the pastoral convention’.
Gifford, Pastoral, p. 128.
235
same time, Riley uses pastoral as a means to address the
effects of the pollution and reckless exploitation that are
everywhere evident in this supposedly protected area of the
Peak District: ‘So, poetry, grey chemicals on the grass/ an
abandoned centre which is where/ we live’ (18).49 Indeed, the
two registers of irony or parody and environmental protest
converge when the narrator pleads against a return to
Cambridge in lines that succinctly deconstruct poems by Yeats
and Wordsworth: ‘let me wander still in the open/ fields of
failure, where the linnet coughs at eve/ and the daffydil
hides its condom’ (25).50 Here, Riley’s criticism is double-
edged, highlighting the despoliation of natural landscapes on
49 The importance of pastoral to environmentally-conscious writing and
criticism, particularly in North America, is discussed in Lawrence Buell,
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1995), pp. 31-52.
50 The references are to W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which
imagines an idyllic island retreat where ‘evening [is] full of the linnet’s
wings’, and William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in which
the poet-speaker famously encounters a ‘host’ of ‘golden daffodils’. W.B.
Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J.M. Dent, 1994), p. 60;
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1994), p. 207.
236
the one hand, and deflating those literary representations
that promote their idealisation on the other.
The other means by which Riley tempers his use of
pastoral conventions is through recurrent references to issues
of ownership, land politics, and trespass. As Williams
observes, since the seventeenth century a dominant strand in
pastoral writing has ‘offered a description and thence an
idealisation of actual English country life and its social and
economic relations.’51 It is against the persistence of such
idealisations in much contemporary pastoral discourse that
Riley’s concerns with the freedom to roam are pitted. Just
prior to his attendance at the car boot sale, the narrator of
Alstonefield surveys the unpastoral farmyards outlying the village
and quips: ‘It would be specious to pretend/ that any bit of
British countryside is anything/ but an agricultural factory
marked Piss Off’ (23). In these lines, industrialism is not
something that threatens to intrude upon the peace of the
countryside from without but rather a force that manages,
shapes, and owns it already, excluding the pastoral pedestrian
with an aggressive defence of its property rights. Seen in
this light, Alstonefield’s emphasis upon walking and wandering51 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 26.
237
takes on a more obviously politicised aspect, for as Solnit
observes, walking tends to infringe and disrupt ‘the boundary
lines of ownership that break the land into pieces’ and
focuses instead upon the paths by which unauthorised
trajectories and connections may be followed.52 The themes of
trespass and property rights are also broached in the
separately published ‘Alstonefield Part VI’ in which the
narrator describes walking ‘unobserved (fearing the shouts of
angry farmers) over/ the stone-boxed fields’ in order to reach
the ‘sheltered summit’ of Steep Low, which overlooks the
village.53 In such passages, Riley’s solitary walkers are
implicitly aligned with outlaw figures such as poachers and
vagabonds, infringing lawful boundaries that they thereby call
into question. Towards the end of Alstonefield, Riley’s speaker
suggests that the ultimate reason ‘for travelling, walking the
night’ is a search for ‘justice’ (91), and this search seems
bound up with the text’s involved exploration of common land
and public footways. For these, however attenuated and
endangered they are, imply the possibility of ‘creating
52 Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 162.
53 Peter Riley, The Day’s Final Balance: Uncollected Writings 1965-2006 (Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2007), pp. 142, 140.
238
liberal space instead’ (39), in which the bounds of place
would remain porous and open to renegotiation by all.54
In Riley’s poetry, then, the poetics of place often
coincide with the politics of place through issues of access,
ownership, and use. As a writer acutely attuned to the
contested meanings of place, he combines neo-modernist
experiment with an intent to extend or refurbish the more
traditional genres of lyric and pastoral. Although aspects of
Alstonefield reveal a characteristic tendency to oppose the refuge
and serenity of rural places to the frenetic pace of urban
modernity, and to equate natural landscapes with the numinous,
his deployment of pastoral tropes and conventions is typically
self-conscious and ironic. A strain of anti-pastoral critique
is also prominent in the portrait he draws of an
54 Given the detailed research that informs his Peak District poems, Riley
would certainly be aware of the historical precedent for his narrator’s
trespasses in the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Dark Peak
organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation. On the symbolic and
cultural importance of this event see Solnit, Wanderlust, pp. 165-67; and
David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 71-
2. A more detailed insider’s account can be found in Benny Rothman, The 1932
Kinder Scout Trespass: A Personal View of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass (Altrincham: Willow
Publishing, 1982).
239
industrialised countryside in which humankind has scattered
its communities, polluted its natural environment, and carved
up the land into bundles of private property. Riley’s
recurrent interests in the act of trespass and, more
extensively, in walking through the landscape, following its
criss-crossing paths and seeking out areas of common land,
work in opposition to this contemporary status quo,
elaborating an emphatically public conception of what it is to
inhabit and practice place. As Massey argues, place shapes
individual and collective identities not through any innate
form of mystical belonging, but ‘through the practising of place,
the negotiation of intersecting trajectories; place as an
arena where negotiation is forced upon us.’55 Riley’s Alstonefield
illustrates this dynamic, open conception of place in terms of
its preoccupation with ideas of convergence and radiation,
where places are understood as nodes or clusters of relations
that0link up to a myriad of239others and elsewhepes. Place is
‘where lives converge’; where the human and the non-human, the
Local and the global meeu and interqct.
55 Massey, for space, p. 154.