Romanticising Place:

Why we must follow nature

By
Benjamin J Major
Abstract

This is a paper all about humanity’s search for a home. It is about the search for an ideal, perfected
world in which humanity and nature are at last reconciled and harmonized. Though this striving must
surely fail, it is this perpetual striving, the promise of a Utopia, that must ultimately direct our
wanderings. Initially reviewing contemporary research into place, relationality and nonhuman
agency, this paper then reassesses the aesthetic and political theory and philosophies of the early
German Romantics (the Frühromantik). It will be argued that the Romantics were not anti-
modernists but were engaged in uniting freedom and rationality within a holistic framework.
Furthermore, in their philosophy they were attempting to resolve the very same dualisms that human
geographers battle with today; those between self and world, nature and culture, agency and
determinism. The innovative solution put forward by the Romantics consisted in seeing nature as an
organic whole and humanity as the most complex expression of that whole. In this model, nature
comes to its self awareness through the human being. However, nature can also furnish a path back
to the self. In this age in which humanity’s future on the Earth hangs in the balance this paper
suggests that we would be wise to ‘follow nature’ and that in place of thinking of how we can save
nature, we must start thinking about how nature can save us. This notion is illustrated in the case
study of Stanton Moor, a ‘hospitable’ place of particularly ‘quiet sublimity’ in the Peak District
National Park. This paper will show how it is that a place can teach us how to live ethically and how
place can not only be humanized, but humanizing. This paper maintains that place, far from bring the
site of a sedentary and bounded conservatism, is in fact the very site in which the ethical and the
political arises.

“Alas! Alas!
You have destroyed
This lovely world!
A demigod has smashed it,
His fist has dashed it
To pieces and hurled
Them into the void!
Ours is the duty
To gather the fragments and mourn
The lost beauty.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2
Introduction: ‘A land of great absence’

In Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch (Garner, 2004) the reader becomes acquainted with the life story
of the valley of the same name and the powerful affects it has on those who dwell in it or visit it. The
book evocatively interweaves the stories of two temporally distinct moments in the valley’s past and
vividly captures the way that the narrative of an individual life, or of an entire community, is not
only temporal but is also marked out in respect to particular places. One of the novel’s two temporal
strands is set in late 18th century rural England, and these parts of the narrative revolve around the
life of Jack Turner, a ‘jagger’, or packman, who brings back to his family and community the foods,
gifts and ideas that he has encountered upon his travels. After arriving back from one of these many
jags, Jack is informed by his father that whilst he had been away the mysterious ‘land man’ had
made an appearance. The land man, “one of the best of the worser kind of folk”, had been about with
an eye for certain “improvements”, namely, the enclosure of the land, “walling right up Tors”, and
using the sacred high stones as field lines and gates. (ibid: 109) What is worse, the ‘land man’ has an
eye for improving the valley of Thursbitch itself, the very centre of Jack’s world, and to “make it a
farm and build a house there.” Jack’s response to this threat is a blend of grief, fear and anger, and
what he says is telling;

“He can’t, Father. Never. He can’t. If he does, it’ll be a land of great absence.” (ibid:
109, my emphasis)

This is a paper about that fear of absence. It is about that fear of a bare and homogeneous land in
which the spirits of the place have all but been forgotten. It is about the ‘quiet sublimity’ and
fragility that can characterise a place. Above all, it is about an impossible ideal, the search for a
home, for a secure dwelling place in which humanity and nature are at last reconciled and
harmonized.

After first examining contemporary research into place, relationality and nonhuman agencies in
human geography and cognate disciplines, the paper will go on to examine Heideggerian and
Levinasian ideas about place and dwelling. It will be concluded that whilst both outlooks have their
own merits, neither of these philosophers provide us with a fully satisfactory framework for
understanding these concepts. On the one hand we have the anti-humanist ontology of Heidegger
that emphasizes rootedness and autoarchy, and on the other hand the humanistic and nomadic ethics
of Levinas that holds up rootlessness as humanity’s essential condition. This paper argues for an

3
ethics and politics of place that is neither rooted in nationalistic or localist chauvinisms nor gives
way to a rootless cosmopolitanism.

This paper will then take the step of bringing the aesthetic and political theory and philosophies of
the Romantics within the horizons of contemporary geographical debate. Particularly, this paper will
explore the organic concept of nature that originated in the early German Romantic period, the
Frühromantik, which flourished from 1797 to 1802 and included such luminaries as Friedrich and
Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling. Indeed, these philosophies form a pivotal theoretical axis
of the current paper. Why such a thought out of season? Why undertake this exercise when we are
still basking in the receding tides of Foucault and Derrida, Latour and Deleuze and a host of
derivative theoretical products such as Actor Network Theory and the so-called More-Than-Human?
It is easy to forget, and even easier not to have known in the first place, that many of the theoretical
debates that have stimulated geographers in the last two decades or so were confronted in a not-too-
dissimilar form by those in the ‘Romantic circle’ in the closing decades of the 18th century. Culture
and nature, agency and determinism, self and world; these were the great dualisms that the
Frühromantik were striving to unite. Like place, that other motif which patterns this paper, the
Romantics have often been linked to conservatism and a myopic nostalgia.1 Still other accounts have
transformed the Romantics into ‘proto-postmodernists’, intent on destroying the essences and
foundations that underpinned the existing order.2 This paper instead follows the middle road, as
signposted by the historian Frederick Beiser (2003), who maintains that the Romantics were both
more and less conservative and more and less radical then other commentators have dared to
suggest.

There is a sense in which the term romantic is being reclaimed in this paper; away from that usage in
contemporary social theory which sees it as being, as Albert Borgmann puts it, “tantamount to a
refutation,” and “hopeless and regressive if not reactionary.” (Borgmann, 2006: 241) Instead, the
term romantic is used here in the sense that the Romantics themselves conceived of it, where to
‘romanticise the world’ is to

1
Some of the first scholars to regard the Frühromantik as conservative and reactionary included Heinrich Heine,
Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. The tendency to regard Romanticism of all periods as reactionary has been apparent in
Marxist scholarship ever since. Today, as Albert Borgmann notes, the term ‘Romantic’ is often used to describe a
particular idea or belief as regressive or reactionary.
2
Such postmodern interpretations have come from Paul de Man, Manfred Frank and Isaiah Berlin, amongst others. The
historian Frederick Beiser admits learning much from these scholars but accuses this kind of interpretation of being an
anachronism: “It understands that period essentially as an anticipation of postmodernism and imposes contemporary
concerns upon it.” (Beiser, 2003: x)

4
 “[m]ake us aware of the magic, mystery, and wonder of the world; it is to educate the
senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as
sacred, the finite as infinite.” (Beiser, 2003: 101)3

This paper seeks to describe a particularly Romantic form of dwelling. That is, it seeks to describe a
dwelling within and amongst the extraordinary, the strange and the sacred. This has important
ecological resonances. In the 21st century, the human self finds itself estranged from the rest of
nature even though it is necessarily a part of it. It is a matter of urgency that we choose how we shall
henceforth live amongst the other members of the Earth community. Do we continue to reduce
nature to what Heidegger termed a ‘standing-reserve’, i.e. a supply or store of resources ready for
human consumption? 4 Do we attempt self-annihilation by submitting ourselves wholly to some kind
of holistic identification with nature as advocated by certain forms of deep ecology and new age
spirituality if taken to their extremes? Or, as this paper holds, do we recognise that such a complete
holism is just as violent as the reduction of nature to soulless reserve? Might not we instead confess
nature’s unknowability, her elemental strangeness to us, thereby preserving her sacredness and
ensuring that the spirits stay in their places? It is suggested here that it is through contact with
sublime places, particularly places of ‘quiet sublimity’, that we learn how to live with and love the
nonhuman Other.5 The case study of this paper will be the ancient and mysterious Stanton Moor in
the Peak District National Park, and the recent battle to save the site from quarrying. We will see
how this place is at once hospitable and obliging for those that would treat it with respect, but hostile
against those who wish to devastate it. We will see that the Romantic philosopher and literary critic,
Friedrich Schegel, was wise in suggesting that we should ‘follow nature’, for nature can indeed teach
us how to live well if we are prepared to listen. Places, in this sense, can not only be humanized but
also humanizing.

As cultural geographers have long realised, place cannot be viewed as merely a container within
which we live out our lives. Nor can place be described solely in subjective terms, as, say, an
emotional attachment to a particular location in space.6 As we shall see, place might be most
effectively thought of as that in which the self encounters the Other, or that in which relation takes

3
Beiser bases this definition on a fragment written by Novalis in his notebooks. For a translated version of the original
see Beiser (1996).
4
‘Standing-reserve’ (bestand) : A Heideggerian term designating something that “is ordered to stand by, to be
immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” (Heidegger, 1993
[1953]: 322)
5
Throughout this paper the term Other will be capitalized when used in Levinas’s sense of an entity utterly transcendent
and irreducible to the self. Though, as we shall see, Levinas uses it to refer to human beings only, here it will be used to
signify both human and nonhuman Others.
6
Though this is not to say that such descriptions cannot be useful and enlightening; Yi-Fu Tuan (1974; 1977) is one
geographer who has approached place in this way.

5
place. Place then ceases to be a jealously guarded territorial home and takes on the aspect of an Inn;
where two or more unfamiliar travellers sojourn for a while. Place thus conceived becomes not the
site of a sedentary and bounded conservatism but the very site in which the ethical and the political
arises. This leads directly to what is perhaps the central postulate of this paper. To abide by and
defend place so imagined is more than any nostalgic commitment to authenticity and rootedness; in
abiding and defending in this way we hold place open for the political possibilities that are immanent
within it. The very desire to hold place and not to have it fragment and disintegrate, or blur into a
delirium of interrelations and relentless nomadism, exposes our ethics and political ideals as forever
emergent through, and evolving in, place.

Getting into place

“The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form
of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You do not have to search through the books and journals of academia to find endorsement for the
idea that place can deeply affect us. Novelists of the calibre of Proust and Dickens, not to mention
the Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and John Clare, have portrayed place as being a
constitutive and affective part of our experience. In her recent book, The Earth Path, the pagan
author and activist Starhawk stresses how important it is to become familiar with a particular place if
one is to observe and discover the patterns and rhythms of nature. To observe these patterns we must
be ‘rooted in place’, and find a ‘special place’ that we can return to again and again (Starhawk, 2005:
56). Raising concern for a specific, threatened place also plays a large part in environmental
campaigning. Environmental Direct Action (EDA) protests in Britain have often focused on saving
particular places from development and destruction, such as the Newbury bypass and other Anti-
Road protests in the 1990’s. In newspapers and on billboards, talk of place is all around us.

Within human geography, place is evidently a core concept as its central place in introductory
textbooks easily testifies, and it is one that has not avoided its fair share of critique and contestation.
The concept of place is often associated with a sedentary conservatism and a misguided faith in
timeless authenticity. One of the pivots on which debate turns is the extent to which place can be
conceived as a discrete bounded entity that offers a ‘groundedness’ and ‘authenticity’ in the face of a
global space of flows and networks. This is tied to the idea that the ‘local’ is somehow more
grounded and more authentic than the ‘global’ and ‘national’ and that, furthermore, the local is

6
always the victim of globalisation. One of the foremost critics of this conception of place is Doreen
Massey, who in a recent book (2005) and paper (2004) questions these commonly attributed features
of place. Massey calls into question statements made by writers such as Edward Casey and
Christopher Tilley which suggest that place is always a prime source for the production of identity,
and that place is always more meaningful than space (Massey, 2004: 7). Her argument, based upon
the conviction that places are relationally constructed and are always the ‘meeting places’ of various
trajectories, is that place is not always victim and neither is it always defensible. Indeed she claims
that it might be “a crucial political stake to challenge and change the hegemonic identity of place and
the way in which the denizens of a particular locality imagine it” (ibid: 7). This is a crucial part of
her wider argument for a politics of relationality, that is, a politics that sees places as having
radically contrasting and unequal positions in relation to globalisation. This politics in turn brings
with it a new recognition of responsibility towards those ‘distant others’ with whom we are
implicated by virtue of this interconnectedness.

Interconnectedness and relationality are, of course, part of another currently favoured set of concepts
in contemporary geographical discourse. This paper by no means wishes to deny the significance of
these concepts; what it does argue, however, is for a bit more care in the working out of the terms of
this relationality. In a recent paper on this topic, Paul Harrison suggests “that any thought or theory
of relationality must have as its acknowledged occasion the incessant proximity of the
nonrelational.” (Harrison, 2007a: 590) If the basic trait of relation is that of ‘being-held-toward-
another’ then the danger of insisting upon the relational is that this trait of relation gets “closed down
into a soporific and somewhat self-satisfied holism” where nothing resists being subsumed into
relation and we are always already connected to everything else (ibid: 591). Yet, in the context of
place, it is easy to see why this idea is patently absurd and undesirable. Even in the most familiar of
places we are faced with an excess that escapes reason and comprehension, and as soon as we leave
those most familiar of places we are faced with such an excess of otherness that we are soon left
with little doubt that we dwell amongst unknowns incapable of being subsumed into a totalised
holism. Otherwise what a dull chore a stroll in the countryside would be! Proust isolates this
splendid experience of walking amongst otherness with characteristic perceptiveness when his
narrator recalls a certain walk undertaken regularly as a young boy on which

“a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to
enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to
be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come

7
 and take but which despite all my efforts I never managed to discover.” (Proust, 2002
[1913]: 214)

Massey is thus too quick to disregard the arguments of writers such as Casey and Tilley, who are
alive to the power of place that is alluded to in the preceding observation from Proust. It seems to
stem from a mistaken belief that these writers postulate some sort of timeless authentic place. Yet a
considerate and thorough reading reveals that these authors understand place as having both
temporal and spatial aspects, and thus as intrinsically having an identity that changes over time.7
Moreover, as we shall see by the end of this paper, if we take place to be that in which experience
and identity arise and that in which we are primarily ‘held-towards-another’ in a relationship of
responsibility we can begin to construct an ethics and politics of place that builds upon Massey’s
helpful but somewhat vague notion of a ‘politics of relationality’. But before we reach this stage,
some more questions must be asked of place.

Let us remind ourselves of the quote from Goethe, the epigraph to this section. How can the ‘form of
the past’ come to persist in the present? How can a region, or a place, make us ‘feel’ a certain way?
Let us return to thinking about the valley of Thursbitch as it is powerfully portrayed in the novel of
the same name. Here, the landscape seems to gather together and somehow preserve the lives,
thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that landscape in two distinct periods
of its past; the 18th century and the 21st. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she
does from an incurable short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it
quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a
geologist, Sal can scientifically identify the valley’s rocky outcrops and layers at first sight, yet there
is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that “this place
knows we’re here”. Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a “strong
atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed
place.” (Garner, 2004: 87)

Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic ‘gathering’ quality. In addition, many
have tried to explicate the ‘interanimation’ of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian,
taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, lead us to consider. For the
philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a

7
It must be said here that Massey does not completely disregard place by any means. As she herself says, her argument
“is not that place is not concrete, grounded, real, but rather that space – global space – is so too.” (Massey, 2004: 7) The
purpose here is not to refute Massey but to defend phenomenologists such as Casey and Tilley and show that far from
impeding us from understanding relationality they can help us understand the concept better.

8
phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also “experiences and
histories, even languages and thoughts.” (Casey, 1996: 24) Interpretative archaeologist Christopher
Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that
dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places
themselves, Tilley writes, “may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue
of the actions and events that take place in them.” (Tilley, 1994: 27) Furthermore, particular objects
and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of
individuals and groups, “providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human
attachment and involvement.” (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch, where the high
stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner, and
presumably his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be
honoured, “just so long as it’s done proper, and we mind us manners” (Garner, 2004: 31). The
question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and
histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as
Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow
that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the ‘sentience’
of the landscape.

In Place and Experience (1999), philosopher Jeff Malpas shows that place is a complex but unitary
structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and Other. He
explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the
topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to show how places
have a role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential
role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in
place, but in time also. He writes, “Proust’s achievement is to display the disclosure of the
multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the
spatio-temporal unfolding of place.” (1999: 163) Places too, have their own personalised, humanized
character; a character that, again, unfolds through time: “the past, even time itself, can be seen as
taking on an embodied, spatialised form in features of the surrounding environment.” (Ibid: 180)
Malpas goes on to elucidate why any idea of a place which is immune to change and disintegration is
one that does not fully recognise the meaning of place. A place immune to change is a place where
self and Others cannot appear. Indeed, it is a place where nothing can appear. “To seek an escape
from the transience and fragility of place”, Malpas argues, “is to seek an escape from place itself.”
(Ibid: 191) As we are necessarily beings that live our lives in places, so it is that

9
 “every such life is a life lived amidst a richness that cannot be protected from
vulnerability and loss, so every such life is defined by the experience of both the wonder
and fragility of place- by the experience of place lost and regained, by the experience of
place as indeed ‘humanised and humanising’” (Ibid: 193)

Later on this paper will investigate a place that is seen by many as being especially wonderful and
particularly fragile. But for now let us shift our attention to the concept of agency; a further vital
ingredient in our defence of place.

Place and Agency

“The places I know well, the people very slightly. But the places themselves seem like
people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality easily disillusioned by life.”
Proust

Ever since the 1970’s and the move away from the ‘field studies’ model exemplified by the work of
Carl Sauer and W.G. Hoskins, there has been an increasing emphasis laid on the qualities, rather
than the observable material facts, of landscape.8 In particular, two influential strands have shaped
geographical enquiry. Firstly, the 1980’s and 90’s saw the emergence of work which began to think
about how places and landscapes are conceived and constructed through cultural processes and how
the natural world is invested with social meanings (see Cosgrove, 1984; Duncan and Duncan, 1988;
Daniels, 1989). Broadly speaking, this work tends to adopt an observational, interpretive tone.
Secondly, a phenomenological approach to studying place and landscape was developed (for
example Seamon, 1979; Meinig, 1979) which sought to investigate the subjective experience of
place and landscape as it is lived, using the notions of embodiment and of inhabitation. John Wylie
identifies an important tension between these two ways of viewing a landscape; that between
observation and inhabitation. For Wylie, these two words continue to stand for different ways of
studying and knowing landscape:

8
The terms place and landscape are both used in this section, seemingly interchangeably. However, the author does
accept that the terms do carry quite different connotations. Christopher Tilley suggests that the difference between the
two is one between inclusion and exclusion: “A concept of place privileges difference and singularity; a concept of
landscape is more holistic, acting so as to encompass rather than exclude.” (Tilley, 1994: 34) In addition to this, there is
as Tim Cresswell points out, an inside/outside distinction. Cresswell writes that “Landscape is an intensely visual idea.”
Places, in contrast, “are very much things to be inside of.” (Cresswell, 2004: 10) It is hoped that this paper goes
someway to showing that place is not quite as closed and exclusive a concept as Tilley’s comment suggests. Also, a lot
of landscape writing has sought to go beyond the idea of landscape as merely a visual phenomenon, bringing the
concept somewhat closer to that of place. At any rate, the usage of both here is meant to signify that these two terms are
inter-related, not identical.

10
 “[A] gap opens up in contemporary landscape studies, a gap between observation and
inhabiting, between the critical interpretation of artistic and literary landscapes and the
phenomenological engagement of cultural landscape practice.” (Wylie, 2007: 6)

This is not the only tension that Wylie finds haunting landscape studies in contemporary geography.
Another is that between culture and nature. Cultural geographers have for some time critiqued any
clear cut distinction between these two domains and, as Wylie notes, many cultural geographers
have focused upon the cultural construction of nature. However is it not the case that a concern
primarily with the constructed or discursive nature of place leaves nature herself muted? One of the
tenets of this paper is an insistence that, important as these constructivist approaches undoubtedly
are, any interpretation of place as an object or product of cultural processes privileges the gaze, the
activity and epistemology of the subject and so overlooks the materiality and activity of the
landscape itself. This paper holds to the view that places and landscapes, along with their human and
nonhuman inhabitants, do indeed have a transformative and creative agency.

Of course, a large body of work has already built up within geography and cognate disciplines that
reintroduces nonhuman actants into social and cultural analysis. Much of this work has been
concerned with putting forth a relational view of the world; a world created by the diverse and
hybrid agencies of numerous actants, both human and nonhuman. Actor Network Theory (ANT),
originating in the work of Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna Haraway (1991) and subsequently taken
up by a number of geographers (see Law and Hassard (1999), Thrift (1996) and Whatmore (1999)
for examples) has been an influential development in this respect. In ANT we find a relational
ontology in which the nonhuman (a term which includes human technologies as well as plants,
animals and rocks) has as much influence and ability to act in the world as do human beings. To
some this will be an obvious enough state of affairs. But arguably it is one that has been continually
dodged in social theory, in which the human has time and again been the measure of all things. Sarah
Whatmore has taken this approach further than most and her book Hybrid Geographies (2002)
marshals examples from the world of biotechnology and conservation to show why we need a new
geography that recognises the fact that we live in a post-humanist world; a world in which the
boundaries between humans, animals and other organisms are blurred. Another hybrid text,
Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture (Harrison et al., 2004) argues along a
similar line. The authors contend that “there is a ‘new geography’ because it is important to
appreiciate that the world is now patterned by both human and nonhuman processes.” (2004: 9-10)

11
Some writers have expressed difficulties with the topological and connectivist ontology that ANT
and hybrid geographies represent. In their book Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in
Their Places, Jones and Cloke (2002) are in agreement with Actor Network theorists that nonhuman
entities, in their case trees, do indeed have agency of their own. However, they are concerned that a
purely relational conception of agency actually works to obscure the particular, creative, agencies
that individual entities display. With obvious similarities to Harrison’s argument that the trait of
relation is in danger of being “closed down into a… self-satisfied holism”, Jones and Cloke point
towards a tension that exists “between the notion of relational agency – when that of any individual
(be it human or otherwise) is subsumed by and incorporated into some creative network - and the
notion that beings and things of various kinds do perform some kind of particular individual
agency.” (2002: 215) Jones and Cloke insist that trees do perform acts of creative and purposive
agency that then become enrolled into human networks (such as in fruit, timber and landscape
production), or that, alternatively, act in conflict with such networks, such as when ‘unruly’ and
‘overgrown’ trees turn “networks of order into relative chaos.” (Ibid: 215) What we call ‘places’, in
this view, are the very sites where these networks materialise and converge. Actor Network Theory,
in its relational and topological emphasis, has tended to regard place as a perilously sedentary
concept and this has led to place being somewhat downplayed. On this point, Wylie writes that
hybrid geographies present us with “a topology without topography – a surface without relief,
contour, morphology or depth” (2007: 206). Such theorists usually prefer to think of place as ‘event’
or “as dynamic, as taking place only in their passing” (Doel, 1999, as cited in Jones and Cloke, 2002:
76). Jones and Cloke share this notion to a certain extent, but are prepared to accept that places do
“retain some thread(s) of peculiar narrative which sustains them as places… imaginings which make
the word ‘place’ still necessary.” (2002: 216, emphasis in original) Of course, in addition to
flattening and oversimplifying the complexities that individual nonhumans and places present, such
theories also reduce the human self to a bit player in a network that extends far outside of it. Such is
the point of post-humanism, of course. But how might we go about (re)writing the self in
postmodern theory? That is, how do we elucidate the thinking, perceiving, striving self that Actor
Network Theory so hastily papers over without lapsing back into absolute subjectivism? This is an
issue that we will return to at the end of this paper.

Let us now steer away from Actor Network Theory and hybrid geographies in order to focus on a
recently emergent body of ‘landscape writing’ in human geography that may provide us with a
remedy for the lack of ‘depth and contour’ identified by Wylie. This work is written in the light of
both phenomenological and poststructuralist understandings and, in various ways, attempts to
incorporate insights from, and go beyond, both (see Dubow 2000; 2001; Rose, 2002; 2006; Wylie,

12
2005; 2006; Lorimer, 2006). A recent special edition of the journal Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space introduces some of these new approaches to landscape. In the editorial (Rose and
Wylie, 2006), the authors assert that the aim of the issue is to move beyond the tensions and
dualisms traditionally exhibited in landscape studies, “in order to explore the more cryptic tension of
being ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘on’ the world all at the same time” (Ibid: 477) and that the papers, in quite
diverse ways, “collectively retain an interest in exploring that which is elemental and affective with
landscape, that is, that which is ‘more-then-representational’ (Ibid: 478). In the view of the authors,
all of the papers in the collection reveal the animating qualities of landscape and those “movements,
syntheses, sensibilities, and attachments” (Ibid 479) from which it is inseparable. For example, John
Wylie’s paper on landscape and the gazing subject comes to the conclusion that landscape, rather
than being considered as an object seen by a gaze or as a particular way of seeing would better be
defined as “the materialities and sensibilities with which we see.” (Ibid: 478, emphasis in original).

Mitch Rose is another author who has attempted to rethink the relationship between self and
landscape. Rose asks what would happen if we were to explore the landscape not as a reflection of
something deeper, but as “a thing in itself: that is, as something that solicits and provokes, initiates
and connects, as something that engenders its own effects and affects?” (2006: 542). His question is
broader than this however; what Rose is really asking is in an ontology that favours networks, flows
and ‘becoming’, how then do we account for apparent ossifications and coherencies such as
landscape (and place)? His response is to think in terms of ‘dreams of presence’. This term,
borrowed from Derrida, describes a movement of care in the cultural landscape that inclines towards
holding, “a movement of associating, gathering and attaching” that is a performance of coherence
rather than being coherence itself (Ibid: 544). He proposes that we can use the idea of ‘dreams of
presence’ to theorize “how an always-already deconstructing world can often be presented to us as
closed.” (Ibid: 537). The movement of care, that is, is always-already within deconstruction. From
this starting point, Rose then goes on to consider the work of anthropologist Kathleen Stewart on
storytelling in a West Virginian landscape. His purpose here is to show how the landscape, rather
than reflecting or representing identity, can be looked upon as “something that makes identity
possible.” (Ibid: 548). This West Virginian landscape works itself into a variety of local myths and
stories. It beckons the care of its inhabitants, speaks to them, and engenders ‘dreams of presence’.

“In Stewart’s presentation the landscape and its various components (its hills, snakes,
dangerous bends in the road, broken bridges, flooded and collapsed mines) evoke feelings
(joy, grief, terror), memories, and practices that provide ways to mark and measure one’s
community, one’s history, and one’s own life…. In this sense, it engenders dreams of

13
 presence (expressions of care) that allow those living within the landscape to imagine,
cultivate, and move towards their world (and their place within it) as present and, in the
process, to experience it more intensively.” (Ibid: 549)

The project to overcome the dualisms of inhabitor/observer and nature/culture which has been
illustrated in this section of the paper is not exactly new. As will be shown presently, the Romantics
were themselves engaged in the project to reconcile these realms. We will see, furthermore, that their
solution comprised an attempt to escape the extremes of both sceptical epistemology and dogmatic
ontology. But first, let us now look at another significant strand of thought that informs this paper;
the notion of ‘dwelling’ in the thought of Heidegger and Levinas.

Dwelling in place

“Mortals dwell in that they save the earth… To save the earth is more than to exploit it or
even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it,
which is merely one step from boundless spoliation.” Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger is well known as the ‘philosopher of Being’. His long career, marked by distinct
stages as it is, could nevertheless be said to be a cohesive lifelong search for the ground of Being.
For Heidegger, the liberation of the subject that began with Socrates, and only compounded by
Descartes, was, and remains, a tragedy. It is a tragedy because, as Gauthier and Eubanks (2005)
state, “it engenders the plight of homelessness that blights the modern age.” (2005: 8) The
emergence of self consciousness that occurred when Socrates first solicited man to think for himself,
outside of the holistic world of the polis, severed mankind’s primordial relation to the earth and to
Being9. Heidegger’s project can thus be seen as a “return to the pre-subjective state that man enjoyed
prior to the irruption of individual self consciousness” (Ibid: 8) In Being and Time, Heidegger wants
to argue that human existence (Da-sein) is ‘Being-in-the-world’. That is, human beings are not
subjective egos detached from their surroundings but are “ensconced within a nexus of shared
practices that determines the relations between all beings” (Gauthier, 2004: 39) Heidegger’s work
may have evolved in significant ways after the publication of Being and Time but this dedication to
the question of Being, of existence, remained.

9
For Heidegger, earth denotes the self dependent ground upon which man dwells and builds his world. When used in
this Heideggarian sense of earth as ground it will not be capitalised. When used in reference to our planet, Earth will be
capitalised. Similarly, Being will be capitalised when referring to Being as the ontological Being of beings (onta).

14
In Heidegger’s later work, the notion of ‘dwelling’ becomes an ever more important idea in
understanding Da-sein. What does it mean to dwell? In his famous lecture, Building Dwelling
Thinking, Heidegger showed how, etymologically, the German verb bauen, to build, also originally
meant ‘to dwell’, a meaning that has since been lost. Furthermore, and especially significant to this
paper, the word also contains within it another meaning: “The old word bauen, which says that man
is insofar as he dwells… also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for,
specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.” (Heidegger, 1993 [1951]: 349) Thus, an authentic
dwelling connotes a ‘caring for’ or safeguarding of the earth. As elsewhere in Heidegger’s thought
there is a utopian tincture to this notion of dwelling, in that the ‘art’ or essence of dwelling
authentically is something quite elusive that humans must forever search for. Mortals, claims
Heidegger, “must ever learn to dwell.” (Ibid: 363) That Heidegger’s thesis is tainted with
‘romanticism’ is, as Wylie notes, usually levelled as a major criticism. But what if it is this romantic
aspect of dwelling, this notion that it is an ever uncompleted project that we must strive for, that is
the very detail which can salvage Heidegger’s thesis from the reactionary, even ‘sinister’,
connotations with which it is often associated?

The concept of dwelling has offered one way of overcoming the dualisms of self and world, culture
and nature, representing as it does a potentially more encompassing way of imagining the human in
its environment. For example, in his much cited book The Perception of the Environment (Ingold,
2000), anthropologist Tim Ingold draws on Heidegger to distinguish between the ‘building
perspective’ and the ‘dwelling perspective’. Whereas the former is based upon “the premise that
human beings inhabit discursive worlds of culturally constructed significance, laid out upon the
substrate of a continuous and undifferentiated physical terrain” (Ibid: 172), in the latter it is through
being “inhabited… that the world becomes a meaningful environment for people.” (Ibid: 173). We
thus find in the dwelling perspective a phenomenologically orientated perspective that can help
geographers think in terms outside of the delimited definitions of the nature-culture divide. It should
be recognised, however, that within this dwelling perspective the figure of the intentional subject
still remains; not a detached and meaning-bestowing subject but now an embodied and involved
dwelling body. This is a problem from a poststructuralist, post-humanist perspective which, as we
have seen, has attacked this continued reliance on the human subject as being ‘the measure of all
things’. Mitch Rose (2006) identifies this as a recurring dilemma in landscape studies; even those
that try to avoid the pitfalls of detached egoism. “As soon as the issue of a consciousness is posited”,
he writes, “there is a retreat from the moving world around us and an internalisation (a sealing off)
of the subject.” (2006: 547). This thought will be bracketed for now. But we will return to this
‘problem’ of the constant reappearance of the human self in some shape or form when we meet the

15
Jena romantics, for whom we will find that the ‘problem’ metamorphoses into a positive, and very
productive, tension.

Notwithstanding the criticisms, cultural geographers have, with provisos, made use of the dwelling
concept. Cloke and Jones (2001) explore the concept in their study of an orchard in Somerset. They
forewarn that dwelling is potentially bound up with ideas of home, locality and rootedness before
going on to propound their own view that such ‘simple’ concepts of authenticity do not capture the
temporally complex aspect of a place, in which the past can be copresent with the present (Cloke and
Jones, 2002: 657). The authors stress the ongoing, dynamic nature of dwelling thus: “Dwelling is
about the rich intimate ongoing togetherness of beings and things which make up landscapes and
places, and which bind together nature and culture over time.” (Ibid: 651) An example of this
‘ongoing togetherness’ in action is West Bradley orchard in Somerset, where there is a “rich mixture
of nature, technology and human relations” bound together in a certain ‘authentic’ cohesion, but only
in a “dynamic, time-embedded sense” (Ibid: 658) In addition to material networks such as commerce
and technology, Cloke and Jones point to the imaginative symbolic networks that places are
enveloped within and that, in this instance, locate orchard identity within that flow of meanings
which articulate, amongst other things, concern for the loss of rural England, the destruction of the
countryside and environmental decline more generally. It is due to this growing local and national
sensitivity that “the dwelling vested in Somerset’s orchardness is made more crucial and more
valuable, because it is constantly portrayed as being under threat.” (Ibid: 659, my emphasis) Cloke
and Jones close by insisting that dwelling can only be a useful concept if used with reference to a
world where places and people are interconnected (they talk a lot about flows) and where the
imagining of “some form of idealised past original stable state” is “completely unhelpful” (ibid:
664).

Paul Harrison (2007b) reconsiders the concept of dwelling and indicates how we might carry the
concept beyond Heidegger, and reread it via the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, in order to bring
to thought the ‘event of space’ that dwelling represents in a quite different way. First, it will be
helpful to spell out very briefly some of the main tenets of Levinas’s thought, especially where it
significantly diverges from Heidegger’s. Harrison illustrates how, for Heidegger, ‘Being-in-the-
world’ is an act of self-possession; literally a pulling together and taking possession of the self
against the threat of dispersion that the everyday world (in all its otherness) seems to present. But for
Levinas, the basic posture of ‘Being-in-the-world’ is not one of self-possession but of being held
towards another in a relation of prior, unchosen, and passive responsibility. As beings, we are

16
necessarily and primarily ‘for the Other’, the self as subject (the ‘I’) not arriving until it is
summoned by the Other. Harrison writes,

“It is as if Levinas understands dwelling, and, indeed, the determination of any ipseity
whatsoever, to be composed not through its internal coherence or dynamism- whether
this be thought relationally through holistic closure or otherwise – but rather through its
openness to what exceeds its grasp.” (Harrison, 2007b: 642)

What consequence, then, might this have on the way we employ the concept of dwelling? Harrison
begins his paper in a general way, focusing on the issues and problems that the concept of dwelling
poses. In summary, dwelling names the “constitutive necessity of the taking place of relation.”
Additionally, it is neither realist nor idealist, instead naming the “inflection of space, the twisting and
crisscrossing of interiority and exteriority from which both these horizons gain their sense.” (Ibid:
628) Finally, and crucially, what is at stake in the concept of dwelling is the “engagement with an
exteriority that thought cannot quite master, or at least not without sublation or foreclosure.” These
thoughts touch on some important points that it is important to unpack. Earlier, we met the much in
vogue concept of relationality. We also met Actor Network Theory and identified its tendency to
level the complexities and heterogeneities that beings and places present. If dwelling does indeed
name the site at which the self meets the Other, or, at which one is held-towards-another, then
perhaps this concept offers us an alternative way into thinking about relationality that is attentive to
the very places in which encounters with the Other take place. But in doing so, we should not allow
the concept to sublate or foreclose the Other (to coerce it into a closed and stagnant holism) but
rather allow the Other to remain in its otherness. This is where the difference between Heidegger
and Levinas’s renderings of dwelling are strikingly clear. Harrison interprets the Heideggarian
account of dwelling as ‘enclosure’, as “a limitation of the event of space through the insistence on
holistic closure, autarchy and self-sufficiency” and sets this against his reading of Levinas, for whom
“it is the constitutive openness or unfinished nature of the event of space which gives dwelling its
orientation.” (Ibid: 642) To return to the quote from Heidegger that began this section, we might
now ask exactly how the earth is being saved in a Heideggarian approach to dwelling. Are his
dwelling mortals really setting the earth free to be in its own essence, its own earthness, or is the
earth allowed only an illusory freeness; one that sets the earth free only in so far as it can be
comprehended and rained in by an obsessively self-possessing self that ensnares every thing and
every Other even as its sets them free? At any rate, if dwelling does name the taking place of relation
then it is surely apposite that we work out the terms of dwelling. We cannot, as it were, leave

17
dwelling unquestioned. After all, it was Heidegger himself who called questioning “the piety of
thought.” (Heidegger, (1993) [1953]: 341)

We have now reviewed a number of avenues of thought that geographers and others have employed
to resolve the abundant dualisms that are the bequests of western philosophy. The author would now
like to put forward another avenue, another framework, which is perhaps less well known.

Self and world in Romantic thought

“According to Fichte’s oral remarks… the I is creative through its representations, and
all of reality is only in the I. The world is for him only a ball, which the I has thrown and
which it again catches in reflection!! He ought, therefore, to have simply declared his
divinity, something we expect any day now.” Schiller, in a letter to Goethe

Let us recall once again the novel Thursbitch. In the chapters set in the present, we find Sal returning
to the valley of Thursbitch time and again because it is the only place that remains secure from her
rapidly deteriorating memory. Sal depicts the experience of this memory loss in a quite remarkable
fashion. She recounts to Ian a recurrent dream based upon a fairytale (somewhat disturbing, even by
fairytale standards) she once knew, about a vein Prince who was only interested in himself and his
appearance. In the story, the Prince’s despairing father has a round tower built for his son, whose
roof and walls are made of alternate panels of mirror and window. Through the windows all the
magnificence of the world and the sky can be seen yet the Prince (who loves the room so much he
will not leave it) does nothing all day but admires himself in the mirrors and never once looks out of
a window. After several days in the tower, the Prince begins to realise that the mirrors are, day by
day, becoming gradually wider than the windows, a fact that he is predictably delighted at. Then, one
day, the Prince realises that he can see himself less and less well through those mirrors. He
eventually comes to understand that this is due to the windows getting narrower and thus allowing
less light in to the room. He tries to force the windows apart but cannot. Each day as he tries to peer
into the mirror all he can see is his own self fading. Then, with a final creak, the wall and roof
becomes all mirror. The Prince is alone in the dark. Sal says of her dream, “I’m in that room, but I’m
not the Prince, I’m me. The mirrors are what is now. The windows are what is going.” (Garner,
2004: 121)

A similar feeling might well have been shared amongst the poets, philosophers and theologians of
the ‘early Romantic’ or Frühromantik school, writing as they were in the groundswell after Kant had

18
just written his Critiques and Fichte was casuing a ruckus amongst the more conservatively minded
members of the philosophical faculty at Jena (for his alleged political beliefs as well as his
philosophy).10 Certainly, it must have seemed to the brothers Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling and the
rest of their circle that the windows to nature (to Kant’s things in themselves) were getting ever
narrower whilst the mirrors of the self were becoming ever more encircling. This was seen variously
as a desirable or derisible state of affairs, becoming a source of argument between various members
of the circle as well as with their revered mentor, Goethe. Before we delve into this, however, we
might first make a very brief excursion into critical idealism in its Kantian and Fichtean varieties.

In his first Critique, Kant attempts to show how the phenomenal world of experience (the world as it
appears to one’s consciousness), arose through the impact on our senses of the reality that lies
beyond sensation (the noumenal realm, or realm of things-in-themselves) and their subsequent
interaction with the necessary categories of thought common to all human beings. We have no
access to the noumenal realm, only to the world of experience, and thus the proper object of
scientific thought is this experienced, phenomenal world. As Kant himself qualifies, “The existence
of things, that which appears, is not destroyed as in real idealism; rather it is only shown that we
cannot know anything about them, insofar as they are things in themselves, through the senses.”
(Cited in Richards, 2002: 63) Ficthe, who considered his transcendental idealism to be “Kantianism
properly understood,” (Cited in Ibid: 79) did not allow for such things-in-themselves, the concept of
which was for him a risible idea. In Fichte, both the ego and the non-ego are constituted in an
absolute subjectivity. That is, not only is the self posited through intellectual intuition, but its world
is also. No hidden thing-in-itself lurks on the other side of sensation, such sensation having been
produced by our own, free, creative faculty. Indeed, we might think of such sensations as actively
constituted by the self as a self-limitation to that self. As Richards writes, “The entire world of the
not-I, everything that might have functioned as limits to freedom, originated, according to Ficthe, in
the activities of the absolute ego. Freedom, in this respect, existed as the soil from which sprang all
science and all human acts, from which grew a natural world.” (Ibid: 79)

Then, as now, Fichte’s thesis was hard to stomach, as the quote from Schiller that is the epigraph to
this section aptly demonstrates. However, Fichte was popular because his philosophy was in tune
with the times and its prevailing mood that the age of reason and liberty was arriving (the calamities
of the French Revolution notwithstanding), for, after all, if the world is but a product of one’s own
10
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781. This was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
and Critique of Judgement (1790). Though no Romantic himself, Kant’s writings were inspirational for the Romantic
scholars. Ficthe was greeted coolly at the University of Jena upon his arrival in 1794, as he was alleged to be a
supporter of the French Revolution. He was eventually dismissed from his post on a charge of atheism. (See Richards,
2002)

19
ego then why must there any longer be limitations to human freedom? Because of this, some of the
Romantics were initially quite enthusiastic about Ficthe’s new philosophy, readily seeing ways to
incorporate aspects of it into their own projects. Richards notes that Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
for instance, “found in the Fichtean ego’s longing to fly to a more perfect destiny the counterpart of
the poet’s desire to realize the beautiful object, to achieve infinite perfection in finite form,
ultimately a desire that continually impelled but that could never be realized completely.” (Ibid: 83)
However, the fact that Fichte’s ‘absolute ego’ denied outright the possibility of an external world of
nature troubled these aforementioned authors greatly. It certainly troubled Goethe, who, though
granting that “it is not nature that we know, but that she is taken up by us according to certain forms
and abilities of our minds” still determinedly insisted upon the “idea of the internal purporsiveness
[and thus reality] of organic nature.” (Cited in Ibid: 147) It was this persevering belief in the
existence and agency of nature that led the Romantics to formulate their ‘organic concept’ of nature,
an unusual synthesis of Ficthe and Spinoza (with a little bit of Leibniz mixed in for good measure), a
synthesis of realism-idealism that we will now momentarily explore.

As Beiser (2003) points out, the wedding of Ficthe and Spinoza attempted by the Romantics (in
kernel form by Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin, and later in a more systematic form by
Friedrich Schelling) could at first glance seem an unpromising and somewhat quixotic venture. The
two philosophers represented quite opposite poles. As we have seen, Ficthe was a fervent idealist
and anti-naturalist who held the ego as the absoloute. Spinoza on the other hand was a realist (in
Kantian terms, a dogmatist) for whom nature was the absolute, the infinitie and the divine. For
Spinoza the human self is fimly placed within nature, and as such all of our actions are pre-
determined as part of the natural and divine order of things; a far cry from Ficthe’s radical freedom
of the self. The bold step that the Romantic philosophers made was to bring together the ideal and
physical realms into a unified and organic whole. In this model, the absolute is identified with
nature, vis-à-vis Spinoza, but with Spinoza’s mechanistic paradigm of explanation being replaced by
an organic interpretation. This had the threefold effect of introducing the notion of a living force
(which is where Leibniz comes in), infusing an element of internal teleology, and the addition of a
hierarchy to Spinoza’s system. In this posited hierarchy, nature develops in degrees of increasing
organization, of which the self conscious creativity of the human ego is the highest zenith. The
mental is thus a part of the self-organizing organic whole that is nature, albeit its most highly
developed and complex part. Because of this latter detail, it follows that it is only through (human)
consciousness that nature becomes fully actualised and determinate. If this at first seems the height
of self-satisfied anthropocentrism, it should be noted, with Beiser, that the organic concept “implies
that everything is reciprocally both means and ends… This means that is possible to say both that

20
man develops for the sake of nature as well as nature develops for the sake of man.” (Beiser, 2003:
146)

Yet, it certainly is true that it is this anthropocentric aspect that is most often stressed in the work of
the Romantics. It is also true that the organic theory, far from staying within the realm of
metaphysics, permeated into their aesthetic theory, their literature and their theology. The idea of the
self grasping its identity with nature is a characteristic feature of Romantic writing, whether it is of
the Frühromantik period or whether it is the nature poetry associated with the later English
Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. As Richards identifies, the theory suggested how
“nature might furnish a path back to the self”. (2002: 134) That is, encounters with ‘primitive’ nature
might enable the self to discover itself, or even act as a ‘necessary propaedeutic’ to the correct,
healthy development of the self. After all, as Besier asserts, the education of humanity was the
central goal and highest aspiration of the early Romantics (2003: 88).11 Let us recall the fable that
instigated this section, the one in which the vein Prince stands staring at his fading self, as it ebbs
away into a darkness in which the self becomes closed in upon itself. The Romantics offer an
alternative vision; one in which every window is a mirror to the self and where the self, on glancing
into that mirror, comes back from the twilight to which it is has been deposed. It is a self that, upon
looking through the window, does not fragment and lose itself, but comes back to itself, revived and
whole. A self that finds in nature the self’s other kingdom.

This is all very well, but you may be asking by now a resounding ‘why’? Why blow the dust of a
concept that has so long been out of fashion, even amongst many Romantic scholars.12 What
possible relevance could this organic concept have for contemporary geography or social science in
general? And whereby does it gain its relation to place; the foremost concept explored in this paper?
This will become clear by the end of the paper, when we tie together its many strands. But for now,
just think of how much intellectual effort cultural geography (and other disciplines) has devoted to
interrogating those infamous dualisms between self and world, nature and culture, agency and
determinism and the number of theoretical products that have arisen to think outside of them; those
relational, vitalist and topological ontologies that are inspired variously by Latour or Deluze. Could
it not be that in their rush to pull away from the highly subjectivist humanist geographies of an
earlier period these ontologies have actually relinquished the self, the perceiving subject, at a great
cost? The Romantic philosophers did not abandon the self, even when they accepted that it was a
11
Novalis once confidently penned the following lines: “We are on a mission. We have been called to educate the
earth.” (see Beiser, 1996: 15)
12
Beiser cites Paul de Man and Alice Kuzniar as recent scholars who have concentrated on nonclosure in Romantic
thought. Beiser claims that the organic concept and its holism are essential for unravelling the paradox of Romantic
metaphysics.

21
part of nature; indeed, they believed that they could find the self in nature and vice versa. Beiser
adroitly observes why there might be abiding interest in the Romantic project to synthesise Ficthe
and Spinoza and he is quoted at length below:

“Nowadays philosophers often write of the bankruptcy of the Cartesian tradition, whose
epistemology ends in a complete subjectivism, the limitation of knowledge to the circle
of consciousness; they see the antidote to such subjectivism in a naturalistic or a
Heideggerian ontology, which makes the self one part of nature or history. But such a
remedy is problematic, not least because it does not answer the sceptical problems that
motivated Cartesian epistemology in the first place: How do we know that there is a
nature or history beyond consciousness? We are then left with a dilemma: either sceptical
epistemology or dogmatic ontology. It is one of the most intriguing aspects of romantic
metaphysics that it attempted to escape these extremes.” (Beiser, 2003: 132)

In the philosophy of the early Romantics we find the continual striving of the self to find unity with
the non-self, of culture to find reconciliation with nature, and of the individual to find reconciliation
with the community. It is desperately inaccurate to describe the Romantics as being antimodernists,
because the fundamental problem for them was how to preserve what was valuable in modernity
(freedom and rationality, amongst other things) but to do so within a holistic paradigm. Besier is
therefore correct in emphasising the holistic spirit driving Romantic philosophy and poetry. This
author would argue that it also the reason why Romantic thought has continuing relevance. For we
still live in a world where the choice given to us seems to be either freedom and rationality or a
regressive and reactionary return to nature; either a rootless cosmopolitanism or a conservative
attachment to place and rootedness.13 In the self’s continual longing for an ideal unity with nature,
the Romantics recognise precisely that it incessantly falls short of this ideal. So even as it approaches
nature the self never quite attains unity with it and thus a state of totalisation is never reached. Now
it is time to begin to consider a particular place to see how it is exactly in place that this totalisation
is averted, and in place that the possibility of an ethics and a politics arises.

13
This is exactly the choice given to us by Luc Ferry (1995) who we will encounter again in the conclusion to this
paper. Ferry links German Romanticism not only to Nazi ecology, but also to forms of deep ecology that endanger
democracy and the ‘world of the mind’.

22
The story of Stanton Moor

“Stanton Moor, that strange, gritstone island encircled by limestone.”

Local historian, Roy Christian

In unravelling the story of Stanton Moor, I am indebted to the authors of the Stanton Moor
Conservation Plan (McGuire and Smith, 2007), a recently published document that examines why
the moor is so important and sets out the policies that should be put in place to protect it for the
future. This publication gathers together a wealth of information about the archaeology, ecology and
geology of the moor, in addition to considerations of its aesthetic and spiritual significance. I also
had the benefit of walking around the moor in the company of one of the plan’s authors, Stella
McGuire. During this walk she was able to share more of her insights about this moor’s fascinating
history and, as an archaeologist herself, offer some speculations that didn’t get into the published
plan. I also walked the moor with the area Park Ranger, Pete Bush, who had plenty to say about the
recreational uses of the moor, and illustrated in fine detail the positive and negative impacts that
such usage brings to the moor. A walk was also undertaken with Andy Tickle, Head of Campaigns at
the Friends of the Peak District (the Peak District branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England).
Andy provided an account of the campaign to save Stanton Moor from quarrying that was very
precise and proved essential in piecing together the parts of this long and multifaceted campaign.
These conversations undertaken while walking were chosen as a methodology because the
researcher views them as an effective way of creating a bond between researcher and researched and
of unearthing spontaneous, emotive responses to a place that could not be achieved in the static,
enclosed environment of the traditional interview. Jon Anderson (1999) calls this method ‘talking
whilst walking’ and views it as a particularly successful way of exploring “the relationship between
humans and place to uncover meanings and understandings of the life world.” (Anderson, 1999: 255)

In addition to these walks the researcher also conducted a short ethnography of the Endcliffe and
Lees Cross protest camp. Four weekend visits to the camp gave me insight into the life of these
protestors, and gave me an opportunity to get to know the site. The methodology of ethnography was
chosen in the belief that this method enables the researcher to develop understanding through being
part of the spontaneity of everyday interactions. According to Herbert (2000), ethnography is a
methodology that enables the researcher to explore the complex connections that are established
within social groups and between the places that they inhabit, defend and love. Although a much
longer ethnography would have inevitably provided a more far-reaching account of the relationship
between these people and the place in which they live, the ethnography undertaken was appropriate

23
for this study. I also corresponded with Sarah, who had lived at the site several years ago, and who
gave a particularly useful account of what life was like in the protest camp, and the state of relations
between themselves and local villagers, when the campaign was in full swing. The author was also
able to talk to a few of the local villagers themselves, to find out what they thought about the
presence of the protestors. Furthermore, throughout this research, an attempt was made to listen to
the site. This means appreciating its ability to affect and initiate, rather then merely providing a
context for human actions. As Dewsbury and Naylor note, “the field sites themselves shape our
research outcomes as much as our own research graphs them. Materialities come into play in the
field that proffer their own delimiting agency upon us.” (Dewsbury and Naylor, 2002: 256) So now
let us take a look at Stanton Moor, “that strange, gritstone island encircled by limestone”…

Stanton Moor occupies an elevated and isolated gritstone plateau midway between Bakewell and
Matlock in the Peak District National Park, Derbyshire. The moor has a steep eastern and north-
eastern escarpment offering impressive views, with less steeply sloping southern and western edges.
The three small villages of Stanton Lees, Birchover and Stanton in Peak encircle the moor and a
disused quarry on its eastern side is the site of Britain’s longest running environmental protest camp.
The moor is of particularly high archaeological
importance, containing as it does an
exceptionally high number of prehistoric
features and representing a rare and complex
Bronze Age ceremonial, funerary and
settlement landscape. A large area of the moor
has been scheduled; a designation which
recognizes that the true archaeological
significance of Stanton Moor lies in the fact
that it contains many prehistoric features in
close proximity. Aside from prehistory, the
Fig. 1 Stanton Moor: a gritstone island?
moor also contains much historical-period
archaeology. The moor has a long history of quarrying, due to its high quality sandstone, and thus
there are a large number of active, dormant and disused quarries around its fringes. The moor is also
of ecological importance by virtue of being heather moorland, which is a scarce international
resource, and it provides a habitat for a diverse array of rare or endangered species. Stanton Moor is
also important as a recreational resource, providing a tranquil and fascinating place for families from
nearby towns and villages to come and spend an afternoon. The site also has a strong spiritual

24
significance and draws many people for this reason, to enjoy the special sense of isolation and
wildness that this place seems to provide.

As already indicated, the moor carries upon its surface a considerable number of natural and
manmade features that range from the imposing to the almost imperceptible. The natural sandstone
outcrops and pillars such as the Cat Stone and Cork Stone are particularly outstanding landmarks on
the moor, and are now frequently used by boulderers. The most famous manmade feature of the
moor is the Nine Ladies (see Fig.2), an embanked stone circle dating from the Bronze Age and one
of few such circles to have survived relatively
intact (McGuire and Smith, 2007: 87). The name
is said to derive from the legend that these stones
are the petrified remains of nine women turned
into stone for dancing on a Sunday (Ibid: 109).
Although this is by far the most well known of the
Bronze Age monuments on Stanton Moor, the fact
is that this is but one of at least four stone circles
on the moor, the others enduring in a far less
Fig. 2 Nine Ladies stone circle
complete state. One intriguing aspect of the
moor’s archaeology is the way in which these and other monuments are apparently arranged in a
distinctly linear arrangement, forming a potentially deliberate line that stretches SSW / NNE across
the moor (Ibid: 25). As well as its stone circles, the moor is notable as the site of a funerary
cairnfield, atypical both in its nature (being mostly funerary rather then agricultural) and in its
unusually large scale (Ibid: 86). There are also relict remains of field systems and possible dwellings
around the moor. Lastly, it is worth noting that although the moor certainly seems to be a focus for
Bronze Age activity, it is not exactly isolated in its archaeological significance, existing as it does
within a region that contains much evidence of past usage. For example, the nearby Nine Stone
Close of Harthill Moor may date from the Neolithic (Ibid: 84), making it older than the Nine Ladies
and suggesting the continuing importance of this landscape as a whole over many centuries.

Although rather little is known about the moor’s history from the Iron Age through to the medieval
period, come the early modern period there is much evidence to suggest its importance as both an
aesthetic and an industrial resource. One of the moor’s most prominent features from the nineteenth
century is the Reform Tower, located on the eastern edge of the moor and strikingly visible from the
valley below. Towers such as this were quite fashionable at the time and this one was built by
William Pole Thornhill to show his support for the Reform Act of 1832 in which suffrage was

25
extended, albeit it to a still rather limited portion of the population (Ibid: 99). Incidentally, the tower
itself is built at the boundary where the Thornhill estate met the neighbouring Rutland estate. The
then Duke of Rutland was a Tory, and would doubtlessly have been less then pleased to have a
landmark celebrating liberal reform standing so prominently at his boundary! The physical landscape
of the moor bears witness to many other 19th century ‘improvements’. Throughout this period a
large part of the moor was covered with parkland and plantation, although much of this plantation
was subsequently felled during World War 1 for military timber supply (Ibid: 33). The most acutely
visible ornamental inscriptions in the landscape are those inscribed, literally, into the rocks
themselves. A number of the gritstone outcrops on the moor’s eastern edge are carved with
enigmatic initials, dates and coronets and we can make only informed guesses as to whom these
insignia are designed to commemorate. McGuire and Smith (2007) propose the personalities that
may be honoured by two of the carved rocks; one Harriet Sutherland (Duchess of Stafford and anti-
slavery campaigner) and another the Duke of York; the very same one who is celebrated in the
children’s nursery rhyme as marching his men to the top of a hill and then back down again (Ibid:
99). It appears that there were a number of rides traversing the moor, which would no doubt have
been used for entertaining guests and whose route would have taken those guests past both the
carved stones and the tower.

As well as these ornamental additions to the landscape there is also evidence for continuing
industrial activity in and around the moor, principally quarrying and lead mining, throughout the
early modern period. From the later medieval period onwards there was gradual enclosure of the
moor and its environs. As of 1799 there was still large areas of common land on the moor, but an
enclosure award issued in 1819 saw the remainder of the moor parcelled off and divided between the
local Thornhill family (who remain the landowners of a significant part of the moor today) and the
Duke of Rutland (Ibid: 96). The moor has seen its fair share of protest. Increasing ownership of
mineral rights by landowners in the later 16th century led to disputations between landowners and so
called ‘free miners’ throughout the Peak District. In one dramatic example from 1607, “a group of
miners gathered from nearby villages at Youlgreave and, carrying weapons, marched to Stanton
moor.” Once there they declared that “a custom of free mining henceforth applied within the manor
of Stanton”. The miners were consequently prosecuted for riot (Wood, 1999: 249). In another
incident in 1791, enclosure commissioners staking out the moor for enclosure met with an angry
mob. This is how one local gentleman described it at the time:

“They encountered 'a mob' who 'had assembled in their neighbourhood… the
Comm[issione]rs had a narrow escape for their lives but they were permitted to depart on

26
 a promise of not coming there again'. The author connected the Stanton 'mob' to the
actions of the Sheffield crowd a few days later, who had broken into the gaol and burnt
the house of a gentleman: 'They stuck up all over Sheffield printed Bills with the words
No King in large characters; this I suppose is one mode of exerting the Rights of Man’”14
(Local resident, cited in Wood, 1999: 319)

When the land was not being stormed by angry mobs, industry apparently continued apace and the
evidence for quarrying in particular can hardly be missed; the moor is pockmarked with the remains
of such quarries which have substantially reduced the modern surface area of the moor. Stanton area
sandstone is building stone of an ‘outstanding quality’ and has been used in such luminous projects
as the paving of Trafalgar Square, the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament following war
damage, and recently in the construction of Portcullis House (the new parliamentary building at
Westminster) (McGuire and Smith, 2007: 74). Currently active quarries in the vicinity of Stanton
Moor include New Pilhough, Dale View and Birchover/Stanton Park quarries. These are
accompanied by a number of dormant quarries. The recent dispute caused by the prospective
reopening of one of these dormant quarries is discussed in length below.

Today, Stanton Moor is a widely used amenity and is regarded as a special place by many people.
The Stanton Moor Conservation Plan (McGuire and Smith, 2007) provides a useful insight into the
moor’s diverse aesthetic and spiritual appeal in modern times. As one would expect, people come to
visit the moor for many reasons; from walking the dog through to contemplating the ancient
monuments on the moor and honouring its landscape. One idea that seems to reoccur in the
consultation interviews for this plan is the idea that the moor is somewhat like a separate world,
existing away from the stresses and strains of modernity:

“For some, it has a ‘wilderness’ quality, an appealing remoteness. A frequent comment

was that the moor seemed separate, ‘like an island’, a ‘lost world’, a place apart – close to
but somehow high above and remote from civilization. For children, it is somewhere
where they can enjoy the sense of being ‘lost’ for the day.” (Ibid: 48)

We might speculate as to whether it was due to similar sentiments regarding the special quality of
this landscape that humans first began to make the moor a place of ceremony and burial. That it is

14
Rights of Man: This is more than likely a reference to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, first published in 1791. This
book posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard its people, their
natural rights, and their national interests. Apparently, this book was being sold secretly (and illegally) in the village of
Winster, several miles from Stanton Moor. (Wood, 1999)

27
partly this quality that calls people to the moor in the modern age is doubtless. Some of these visitors
come with explicitly pagan beliefs, whilst others come with more personal beliefs. McGuire and
Smith suggest that for regular, local, visitors this spiritual aspect may be perceived “as a sense of
well-being resulting from a walk among features which are familiar and well loved.” For those from
town and cities it may provide a “sense of renewal and undefined peace of mind” gained by “simply
sitting on the grass near the Nine Ladies stone circle.” (Ibid: 48-49). In a recent study of meanings
and values associated with the Nine Ladies, Isherwood spent time celebrating the solstice at the
circle with the moor’s ‘transient community’. He found that those who gathered here had an
understanding of the site that although “very much a mix and match” was particularly influenced by
Julian Cope’s (1998) popular guide to megalithic sites in Britain, The Modern Antiquarian, and
Cope’s view that “prehistoric monuments are points of contact with an ancient past… whose culture
was morally, politically and spiritually superior to that of a corrupted modern day society.”
(Isherwood, cited in Ibid: 49).

The campaign to save Nine Ladies

Situated on the north-eastern edge of the moor, Lees Cross and Endcliffe quarries have remained
unused since the late 1960s and have considerable ecological and archaeological value in
themselves. However, permissions dating from 1952 (shortly before the creation of the National
Park) meant that quarrying could potentially continue there for a further 90 years until 2042. In 1999
it suddenly appeared as though Stancliffe Stone Ltd (now owned by Marshalls PLC) would once
more begin to work the quarries. This proposed reactivation was met with hostility from some locals
as well as others who were concerned to preserve the moor’s natural beauty and heritage. Part of the
south-western limit of the quarry coincides with the boundary of the scheduled area of the moor.
McGuire and Smith write that, “In addition to the impact of quarrying on the archaeological and
ecological value of the quarries themselves, the proposal to re-open Lees Cross and Endcliffe
quarries is judged by English Heritage and others to have substantial adverse implications for the
adjacent scheduled area of Stanton Moor”. (2007: 79) Aside from this, concerns were voiced about
other environmental damage; including increased traffic and noise pollution, as well as the possible
termination of spring water supply to local houses which are not on mains water. A local campaign
group, the Stanton Lees Action Group (SLAG), was soon formed that petitioned fiercely against the
proposed development. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Peak District branch (now
Friends of the Peak District) also became involved at this stage and worked very closely with SLAG.
A protest camp was quickly established in the Lees Cross and Endcliffe quarries, drawing people

28
from nearby urban areas such as Sheffield and Chesterfield, including many veterans of the 1990’s
Anti-Roads campaigns.

An independent report commissioned by SLAG and CPRE concluded that the proposals were
technically unfeasible and ran counter to much of the 1952 permissions anyway. According to this
report, the actual amount of stone that could be quarried was much less than Stancliffe Stone had
projected. Aside from the technical infeasibility, the detrimental effects of quarrying in this area
were also an issue. As Andy, Head of Campaigns at Friends of the Peak District said in interview:

“We really thought that the proximity to the monument, the potential effects on
biodiversity, the effects on amenity and particularly the vehicle impact meant that the site
shouldn’t be worked at all. And the other thing we called for, we asked central
Government to… give the Peak District National Park Authority the money it needs, to
stop the quarry from working at all. Pay the quarry owners off. Give them compensation.
But save this site, because it’s so important, both within the Peak District, and
nationally.”

Stancliffe Stone proved to be more unyielding than the campaigners hoped. They withdrew and
revised their first planning application and submitted a new one that, to the campaigners’ surprise,
stated that they could get more stone out of the quarry, not less. In addition, the company lodged a
legal challenge to determine whether the quarry was a ‘dormant’ quarry or not; a challenge that they
lost in the High Court in 2004 and once more at the Court of Appeal in 2005. Once it become clear
that this new larger application was politically impossible to implement, a third phase was reached in
which the quarrying company was prepared to give up its rights to quarry at Lees Cross and
Endcliffe in exchange for new rights to extend the nearby Dale View quarry, a site which is deemed
less environmentally and scenically sensitive. Unfortunately, as Andy explained, this merely
changed the “spatial configuration” of protest as the threat of quarrying moved from the vicinity of
one village to that of another:

“Potentially we had one community that this would suit quite well, and one community
which then would become more disadvantaged. And then because of that we got a new
protest group called Stanton Against the Destruction of the Environment (SADE),
emanating from Stanton in Peak, who initially were opposed to the idea of an extension at
Dale View, because they thought, in NIMBY terms, that the problem was then being
dropped on them.”

29
Eventually, in the last phase of the campaign, the various campaigning groups (CPRE, SLAG,
SADE and the Stanton in Peak Parish Council) were able to join together to form a coalition in the
interests of getting the best deal possible for everyone involved. After much careful and painstaking
negotiation this was indeed achieved. The area and volume of stone to be extracted at Dale View
was reduced, as were the number of daily lorry movements, and a small strip of green land was
preserved to act as a ‘buffer’ for the people of Stanton in Peak. Andy stated that this was a “proud
moment…

“Because often in these situations, protestors will carry on protesting to the end, because
they’re not entirely happy. But I think we recognized that consensus had to be the way
forward, and even though we weren’t 100 per cent happy, not everyone was 100 per cent
happy with what we got, most people were sort of 80 to 85 per cent happy.”

Whilst all this vigorous campaigning was going on behind the scenes, the protest camp continued to
exist and thrive, surviving an eviction order in 2004. As is the case with most protest sites, the
population of the camp has been transient, with people coming and going over the years. At the time
of writing, the protestors are busy ‘tatting’ down, dismantling the numerous treehouses and arial
walkways and filling in the many tunnels that were dug in order to protect the site. In its decade long
existence, the site has become Britain’s longest running environmental protest camp. In
communication, one of the protestors, Sarah, spoke of why this particular protest camp has been so
long running:

“I believe protest camps end for two reasons: the campaign is lost and people are forcibly
removed or the protestors win and voluntarily leave. Nine Ladies has the advantage of it
being very difficult to keep people out of the site. Once an eviction begins, word gets out
on a phone tree and people will pour in from all over the country in support. Their aim
would be to get on to the site and be an extra person to be removed by the bailiffs. To
stop this happening at Nine Ladies would be very difficult. This is because of the nature
of the site. It is a very large area to fence and the ground is on a hill and uneven, so a
fence alone would be insufficient for keeping determined people out. Therefore 24hr
guards would also be necessary. All of this would cost a fortune (millions probably).”

Certainly, the researcher heard this kind of comment made frequently by those who live in the
protest camp. It is clear that the landscape itself has aided the camp’s impressive defensive

30
infrastructure. As former quarries, the topography of Endcliffe and Lees Cross is multi-layered and
complex, with hollows and hummocks and abandoned buildings intermingling with the roots and
branches of trees. By burrowing their tunnels underneath colossal heaps of loose rocks the protestors
effectively used the landscape to their advantage, making it doubly hard for anyone to dig them out
without causing a rockslide. The site also presents hazards for the protestors themselves, however,
and the Nine Ladies protest camp is particular notorious for the large number of accidental deaths
that have occurred there over the years; one women burnt to death in her hut, another fell off the
quarry edge and another died in a river. Despite these and other drawbacks, including the threat of
eviction, the protestors have remained a fixed and highly visible presence in the landscape of Stanton
Moor. Their treetop structures are visible from the moor’s eastern escarpment, and their assorted
caravans and campervans are a familiar sight for those approaching Stanton Lees village. Sarah
spoke about why she had come to the camp, and why this is a special place for her:

“I love moors and feel a solitude with them. I love being on a protest site because I can
do something about something I believe in rather than just moan, silently or out loud,
about its loss. To do something to protect something I love empowers me. Feeling
empowered makes me happy. Then I am also empowered by the other people there, who
are happy to stick their necks on the line, are happy to conflict with society, not only by
protecting the site, but in the general way they live their lives. Many things that are not
acceptable in normal society are acceptable on a protest site.”

The relationship between the protest camp and the surrounding villages could generously be
described as varied. Whilst some villages have welcomed the protestors’ presence as a physical
barrier against quarrying, others have seen them more as an unwanted blight on the landscape. Andy
described what the situation was at the time Stancliffe Stone was swapping its quarrying rights at
Endcliffe and Lees Cross, near Stanton Lees, for extended rights at Dale View, near Stanton in Peak:

“The Stanton [in Peak] residents… had quite serious problems about the presence of the
protestors in the quarries… who they felt were causing anti-social issues, both on the
moor, in their own village and in the neighbourhood generally. So it was quite a difficult
situation to resolve in terms of the tensions between the two villages, because the Stanton
Lees villagers, generally, were quite friendly and supportive of the eco-warrior presence.
They saw them, clearly, as a physical restraint to quarrying restarting and they were quite
sympathetic to that.”

31
One protestor who was living on the site at that time was willing to put forward their point of view
on this matter:

“[Stanton in Peak] hated us when I was there. There was a lot of politics which was
suggested to be driven by the fact that they may have a quarry closer to them if we
succeeded in stopping this one [this is a referral to the extension of Dale View quarry,
which indeed, is closer to Stanton in Peak]. Stanton Lees… were supportive. Geoff [a
local resident], and probably some others, often stuck up for us verbally by saying ‘well
they may be on the dole but at least they’re not just sitting around watching TV’ or ‘a lot
of them go off and work for periods of time’. Those who were opposed brought up lots of
criticisms and some of them seemed to be made up. However, there was a protestor with
mental health problems and social problems who was completely out of order. Before I
had come to the site he had done something that had really cemented the hatred… He was
kicked off site by the other protestors, his behaviour having broken the unwritten code.”

Of course, aside from the anti-social behavioural issues that the protest site may or may not have
introduced to the area, many local residents were simply averse to the eco-warriors’ anti quarrying
message. For these locals, continued quarrying in the area, no matter what the aesthetic and
environmental impact, is essential to their livelihood. In answer to the question of how further
quarrying, especially the inevitable increase in lorry movements, would have affected the area, one
local responds as follows:

“Paid for it perhaps? How do you think people live here? This area is built on quarrying
and the jobs it creates. In the great scheme of things a tree will grow back and grass will
return. In the short term, and it is only very short term, people need to live and pay their
way somehow. The area can’t survive on selling cream teas and Bakewell puddings!”

Strong feelings still remain amongst local residents about the continuing presence of the protestors.
This researcher detects that there is bewilderment and irritation amongst local residents as to why
the protestors are still there one year after the final planning application was agreed and the future
of Endcliffe and Lees Cross quarries future seems secure. As one local puts it:

“There isn’t even a threat of quarrying anymore, why are they still there? Because they
are drop outs, who need a cause to justify their laziness.”

32
The protestors themselves are adamant that they will not completely abandon the site “until the last
signature is in place”. Some have moved on. Some of them, protest veterans, have been assisting at a
nearby site in Shipley, Derbyshire, where a group of climate campaigners called ‘Leave it in the
Ground’ squatted in an abandoned farmhouse on the proposed site of a new open cast coal mine (the
eviction of which has been successful; albeit it at great cost and media attention). But it is clear that
Nine Ladies will remain an emotionally significant site for all those who have spent several years of
their lives defending it. One protestor, in informal conversation, said that the last two years had been
like a continuous nostalgic goodbye, as each passing year brought uncertainty as to whether their
home would still remain intact the next. On one of the weekends that this researcher visited, a young
woman from Holland who had lived for some time at the camp in the early years, had returned for a
week especially to keep a private promise she had made to herself; that she would come to help ‘tat’
things down once the camp disbanded. Evidently, at least some of the Nine Ladies protestors have
developed an attachment to this place that it is proving hard to sever. Sarah spoke of the fulfilment
that the saving of this single beautiful place brought:

“Nine Ladies is no more a site worth saving than many, many others which sadly may not
even get a mention or the attention of a group of protestors… Nine Ladies is a piece of
nature and to destroy nature and beautiful natural sites is not something I support. So to
be able to do something to save one piece is empowering, even though many more are
getting destroyed.”

A hospitable place?

“Stanton Moor… a wild uncultivated waste, very high land ,rocky, and produces a coarse
kind of sedgy grass.” Hayman Rooke, 1782

Stanton Moor is a mysterious landscape of ancient circles and modern quarries. A moor crowned
with lines of patient silver birches, enigmatic monuments and huge leaning erratics that rise like
giant limbs from the earth. Protesters nestle in their makeshift tree houses in the woods below.
Sometimes, in the early morning, wild deer may be spotted. As we have seen, it is place with a
history of ceremony, of industry and of protest. It is a place marked by the various practices of
human communities and a place that has called people to gather within it in a variety of ways. They
came here to remember their dead or to celebrate life, and so it is a place of recollection and
commemoration. They come to extract the stone that it offers and use it to construct their buildings,
and as such it is a place of consumption and exploitation. They come to walk it and enjoy it, and as

33
such it is a place of reprieve, of sanctuary from the extremes of city life. It is a place that calls
humans to gather, to hold it and preserve it, to reside in its hollows and fight for its right to exist, as a
place of sacredness, of life.

Edward Casey (1993) proposes four characteristics of sublime ‘wild places’. These are barrenness,
vastness, impenetrability and isolation. Stanton Moor can hardly be described as barren, vast or
impenetrable. Compared to the large and daunting gritstone moors further north in the Peak District
National Park, Stanton Moor is humble, amicable, even obliging. Stanton Moor is an example of a
place that, in the words of Goethe, proffers a ‘quiet feeling of sublimity’. If the sublime is that which
fiercely defies full comprehension, or, in the words of Kant, resists “ideas involving higher finality”
(cited in Casey, 1993: 201) then Stanton Moor is less than sublime, or has a quieter sublimity, as it
does not so much displace and desolate (as Casey seems to think a sublime place would do) but
restores and lifts the spirit. Casey cites a passage of John Ruskin’s to illustrate how a wild place need
not attain the sublime. Writing about the lower Alps, Ruskin describes them as possessing “a
strength that is as yet restrained”. Here, instead of a dramatic discord between imagination and
understanding as is inherent in the sublime, there is “a deep and majestic concord.” (Ibid: 240) We
have already seen comments that liken Stanton Moor to a ‘lost world’ or an ‘island’ isolated from
civilization. This is a place where people feel safe. Though it is possible to get disorientated on the
moor (this author had to direct a family to the Nine Ladies stone circle on his last visit) it is unlikely
that anyone would find themselves lost and stranded. A short walk in any direction eventually takes
you to either a road or to a view over farms, villages and factories; reminding you that civilization is
still near at hand. Regardless of what Hayman Rooke may have found in the 18th century (see
epigraph), in the 21st it is evident that here we have a place neither wild nor uncultivated.

In addition to being a place of particularly quiet sublimity, we could add that this sublimity of
Stanton Moor emerges ‘under the form of the past’. The past is manifest and inescapable on the
moor, and when we walk upon it we are walking amongst the accumulative effects of thousands of
years of cultural interactions with the land. First, let us take the Bronze Age funerary cairnfield that
covers a large portion of the moor. It is likely that most visitors to the moor are not aware of the
existence of this extensive archaeology and know only of the prominent Nine Ladies stone circle
(McGuire, personal communication), but to the trained eye it is clear that the landscape of the moor
has been notably transformed by this activity. Various mounds, depressions and other earthworks
associated with burial activity cover the surface area of the moor. But this disturbance of the land did
not cease with the Bronze Age. From at least Romano-British times onwards the landscape has also
been quarried; and this endeavour has left its own marks on the moor, large chunks of it having been

34
removed. As one of the protestors vividly describes, “[The moor] is not that big, you know, because
it’s been eaten all the way round. It’s like an apple core. It’s just been eaten by quarries.” The
landscape improvements of the 19th century, the commanding presence of the Reform Tower, even
the barely noticeable, elusive insignias that have been engraved into the rocks; all of these add in
their own way to the profound time-depth that this place conveys. We could say, with Malpas, that
this is a place in which the past has taken on an “embodied, spatialised form” (Malpas, 1999: 180).

What of the Nine Ladies itself? Numerous people have remarked on its magical, peaceful quality.
We might identify some logical rationales to explain these alleged qualities. For instance, the circle
is situated in a grassy clearing in the only wooded area of the moor. As well as providing a buffer
against the elements, causing this spot to be stiller and much quieter than the exposed parts of the
moor, this wooded setting also provides the circle with an aesthetically pleasing backdrop, as well as
“an appealing element of surprise, as the circle comes into view” (McGuire and Smith, 2007: 47).
Rather than explaining away peoples’ attachment to the circle, such an explanation only goes to
show how intimately people are drawn to particular places. If Casey is right in ascertaining an
affinity between the physiognomy of a place with the psyche of an individual then we might
conjecture that the circle’s securely sheltered situation, in the midst of a thin woodland (so thin as to
be unthreatening to even the most ardent lover of open spaces) is exactly what creates the feeling of
peacefulness and solitude reported by visitors. This is a far cry from the vastness, barrenness and
impenetrability that Casey pinpoints as being the essential characteristics required of a place that one
experiences as sublime or desolate. Indeed, out of the four traits that Casey identifies, only the trait
of isolation seems to apply to the Nine Ladies and Stanton Moor more generally. As Roy Christian
so acutely observed, the moor is like an island of gritstone in a sea of limestone. This distinct
geology, and the different flora and fauna it gives rise to, gives the moor an atmosphere wholly
removed from the surrounding area. This isolation, on its own and without the other three traits to
accompany it, becomes a positive isolation. People are not desolated here. They do not stare
despondently at an unfathomable nature, inhospitable to their needs and desires. Rather they find
themselves refreshed and replenished here. Nature furnishes here a path back to the self and the soul.
As one visitor put it:

“Stanton Moor makes me understand the definition of the word ‘living’. I feel that my
mind and body sing when I am here… I feel as if I had found the soul I always thought I
had.” (Cited in McGuire and Smith, 2007: 49)

35
The same strong connection between people and place can be observed at the protest camp, whose
inhabitants live in and amongst the rich, verdant, abandoned quarries of Endcliffe and Lees Cross.
Once again, this place (situated on the sloping north-eastern edge of Stanton Moor and thus a place
within a place) is not entirely wild. Here, nature has literally intermingled with culture. The quarry’s
naturally sloping gradients combine with the deep cavities which humans have cut out of the ground.
Trees grow in and around the ruined and neglected buildings. One of these dwellings was probably a
smithy, the remaining stone stool and hearth bringing to mind one of the hard working peasants so
often described by Heidegger. But though nature may have reclaimed this place, the place can hardly
be described as either hostile or barren. In fact, it is the very opposite of hostility. This place opens
itself up for responsible human dwelling; with its sheltered nooks, its pleasing greenery and its
convenient natural spring. It is also well equipped for its own defence. It is no accident that much of
the ancient woodland that still exists in the Peak District is to be found on steep slopes, where it
becomes infeasible to clear. The topography of these quarries, coupled with the presence of the
protestors, proved to be formidable and effectively discouraging to potential defilers. Thus, the three
accidental deaths notwithstanding, we have a place that generally shows hospitality to those who
wish to dwell carefully and respectfully within it, but which can readily turn hostile towards others
who would disrespectfully corrupt it.

Casey writes that the genuinely ecological question of our time is not so much whether we can save
the land but whether we are willing to let the land save us (Casey, 1993: 263). In the preceding
section we saw how the campaigning group CPRE always worked within the parameters of the
former question. Even the comments made by the protestors display this prejudice. It is always how
can we save the land? How much land can we save? If we were not here, all of this would be gone
(this sort of statement was made a number of times at the protest camp). But we have already seen
that the land and its nonhuman occupants have displayed considerable agency in affording suitable
dwelling niches for the protestors and providing a landform that makes it doubly difficult for bailiffs
to successfully evict. Therefore it would seem that the overlooked starlet of the battle to save Nine
Ladies was the landscape surrounding Nine Ladies itself! Of course, it would be ridiculous to
suggest that Endcliffe and Lees Cross quarries could have saved themselves without any human
help, so perhaps it is best to say that this victory was a symbiotic and cooperative achievement.
Nonetheless, although Nine Ladies might now be saved, the prospect for humankind is bleaker. In
place of the defeated quarry, another quarry is built nearby. As Sarah so shrewdly noted, for every
place that is deemed worth saving, another place is destroyed without recognition. Every second,
approximately one acre of rainforest, our planet’s very lungs, is destroyed. There is therefore great
merit in Casey’s plea to stop thinking about how we can save nature and instead start thinking about

36
how nature can save us from our demise. For Casey, this recalibration occurs first and foremost in
place. Ecocentrism calls for lococentrism, an ethics of place. Casey talks of a sympathetic bonding
that occurs when we yield to wild places, when we inhabit a wild place sufficiently to make it
become familiar to us. When we sympathise with a wild place in this way, the partition between
nature and culture dissolves.

The protestors of Stanton Moor have formed exactly this kind of sympathetic bond with a place, and
in their simple dwellings we see this meeting of nature and culture most conspicuously. The
protestors live in surprisingly durable, robust huts (there are also many benders and tree houses, but
most of these are now long vacant and dilapidated) that provide adequate shelter from wind and rain.
Despite this sturdiness, however, the boundary between these dwellings and the outside world is
undoubtedly more permeable than most house dwellers are used to. It is a minimal human world,
humbled by the earth. In Heideggerian terms, we might say that the protestors have re-seated
themselves in the house of nature. Sited in this place that is very much an intermingling of the
natural and cultural, these simple dwellings represent the ‘multifarious between’ in which these two
realms meet.15 This is not to say that the protestors have totally re-established a real or imagined
idyllic connection with nature, nor that this was exactly their aim. The traces of culture remain, for
example; the communal cooking area has a gas oven; the camp has radios and other elements of
human technology, not to mention the large amount of commercially produced alcohol consumed on
a daily basis. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to share to say that the protestors, by virtue of their
way of life, have a lighter impact on the environment than most of their contemporaries in Western
society. The protestors’ dwellings could be seen as anti-homes. Edward Casey talks of the anti-home
in the context of Henry David Thoreau, the American author, transcendentalist and anarchist who in
1845 undertook a two year experiment in ‘simple living’ in the woods. Casey states that “Thoreau
intended the experiment at Walden to demonstrate the real possibility of setting up an anti-home, a
dis-habitation by way of re-inhabitation in the wild. Only by abandoning the assurances and
reassurances of the home-place can one begin to settle into a wild place and start to live on its
demanding terms.” (Casey, 1993: 249) In this anti-home, it is the land and the elements that lead. In
abandoning or otherwise leaving their home place and settling into the wild, the protestors have left
the cultural hearth and home and moved to a more primordial home. Such is the desire of many,
dissatisfied by the rootlessness and emptiness they perceive in modern liberal democracies, who
wish to return to a more authentic home. But can this return ever be completed without the

15
Multifarious between (vielfältige Zwischen): A term that Heidegger uses. Let us say, with Casey, that it stands for the
middle realm in which nature and culture, no longer antipodes, meet in a relation of consanguinity.

37
possibility of sublimation and violence? Can, and should, humans ever feel completely at home on
this earth? Let us turn once more to Heidegger and Levinas in perusal of answers to these questions.

The search for a home

“Philosophy is really homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere in the world.”

Novalis

Heidegger and Levinas hold very different views about the home and about homelessness.
Heidegger laments humanity’s homelessness; its inauspicious break from the house of Being and the
subsequent drift into metaphysics, the latest manifestation of which is modern technology. Modern
technology, for Heidegger, uproots man from the earth and leaves him lost and alone in a world of
his own making. “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we
passionately affirm or deny it.” (Heidegger, 1993 [1953]: 311) While Levinas certainly agrees that
technology uproots human beings, he would strongly object to the idea that it makes them unfree;
rather technology liberates, it frees man from his partisan attachment to place. Levinas claims that
“technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions regarding place.”
(Cited in Gauthier, 2004: 179) In the same essay, Levinas writes that “The earth is for man. Man is
his own master, in order to serve man. Let us remain masters of the mystery that the earth breathes.”
(Cited in Ibid: 181) By wrenching us away from place based superstitions, technology also frees us
from the cruel native/foreigner dichotomy that is always implicit in any overt attachment to place.
Technologies allow us “to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the
human face shine in all its nudity.” (Cited in Ibid: 179) Neither of these viewpoints satisfies this
author. Though Levinas is correct to warn of the dangers that can come of a place attachment that is
too insular and intolerant, he shows himself to be too optimistic about the benefits of technology. For
a start, it is questionable just how much technology has really stripped humanity of its parochial
mentality. Furthermore, this author would argue that technology has wrenched humanity too far and
too violently from the earth. The conceit that we can remain ‘masters of the mystery’ is surely
discredited now that our dire impact on the Earth has become clear. Indeed, with such a statement,
Levinas’ spectacular anthropocentrism becomes clear. This is why the remainder of this section is
dedicated to exploring why place is important as the site in which we find ourselves not as masters,
but as dwellers within a mystery that we cannot quite fathom.

In a recent and noteworthy study Onno Oerlemans (2004) draws attention to a strain of Romantic
thought that is focused on the materiality of nature, “the concrete particularity of the natural world

38
that exists purely and simply apart from our conscious interest in and active alteration of it.” (2004:
201) Oerlemans’ main concern is to show how, for these writers, this interest in the material “led to
the contrasting awareness that the physical world was less comprehensible and more alien than these
writers hoped it would be.” (Ibid: 201) Likewise, in her investigation of the ‘poetics of place’ in
European Romanticism, Kate Rigby (2004) points towards a particular Romantic ‘ecopoetics of
negativity’, in which “it is not the adequacy of the poetic word but its perpetual falling short that
directs us toward an earth and world beyond the page, where we are indeed invited to dwell, but in
the midst of the elemental, the uninhabitable, and the incomprehensible.” (2004: 12) Rigby explains
that the places about which the Romantic poets wrote were often not their home places but were
“places of encounter with the other: exotic, erotic sublime places, places of belonging or dread,
imaginary places, places marked precisely as un-homely or eerie.” (Ibid: 88). Indeed, is it not the
case that ‘not being at home’, the experience of a place as unknown or strange is “of the very
essence of dwelling?” (Ibid: 89) Rigby introduces the notion of ‘dwelling ecstatically’ to describe
this dwelling amongst the unknown, alongside a cautionary note, in the following quote:

“And it is into this ecstatic dwelling, the aesthetic correlate of which might be termed ‘the
sublime’, that the Romantic poetics of place, more often than not, invite us. To open
oneself to the sublime dimension of an earthly dwelling place is nonetheless very
different from being forced to abandon one’s home, seeing a holy place profaned, or a
beloved place made strange, perhaps even rendered uninhabitable, for those who
formerly dwelt there.”(Ibid: 91)

Ecstatic dwelling and homelessness, then, are not synonymous terms and the latter should not be
exoticised as if they might be. In one we willingly expose ourselves to the wonder and strangeness
that an un-homely place can offer us, in the other we find ourselves forced, against our will, to
wander in a strange and sometimes inhospitable land. We see this clearly in the case of Jack Turner,
the 18th century packman from the novel Thursbitch, whom we encountered at the beginning of this
paper. Returning home from a jag to find that the ‘land man’ had been around looking to turn the
valley into a farm and build a house there, Jack is gripped by fear and grief. Despite his status as a
wanderer, as one who travels far from home from county to county buying and selling goods, the
disturbing thought of losing that home, that centre, drives him into blind panic. Never mind that the
valley’s physical presence may remain relatively unaltered; for him, and his community, this
desecration of a place is tantamount to replacing this place (with all its richness, its meaningfulness)
with a ‘great absence’. The same goes for Stanton Moor. On the Stanton Lees Action Group website,
two images have been tellingly juxtaposed (see Figs. 3 and 4). Fig. 3 shows Lees Cross (the site

39
where the proposed quarry would have been) and Fig. 4 shows a working quarry (in fact the nearby
Dale View quarry). The former photograph shows the tree covered hillside in all of its rich
Autumnal glory. The photo is crammed with the evidence of life. The latter presents a dreary, grey
and almost literally life-less scene with a solitary mechanical digger and a few sparse trees in the
background being the only clues that this might actually be Earth. A place containing many life
forms is reduced to a place notable by the absence, barring quarry workers, of any such forms.
Indeed, as the land was literally scooped away for this quarry we can say that in this case, more so
than in Thursbitch, place has given way to absence.

Fig. 3 Lees Cross as it is now Fig. 4 A working quarry

In his fascinating inaugural lecture at Freiburg University, What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger

elucidates the following particularly notable characteristic of our experience of the world. Though
we may never totally comprehend particular beings in their wholeness, it is nevertheless the case that
we “do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings that are revealed somehow as a whole.”
(Heidegger, 1993 [1929]: 99) Let us think this through. If we are in a place we do not know well (let
us say we have just arrived at a foreign town) we certainly cannot claim to know everything that
surrounds us in any particular detail and yet, nonetheless, there is a sense in which this place
surrounds us and presents itself to us in all its ‘placeness’ and wholeness, no doubt because we have
experienced other towns that are more or less similar to the one we now find ourselves in. Now let us
bring to thought a place we know well, our home perhaps, or a particular spot in the countryside we
like to return to. Here, if anything, the presenting of ‘placeness’ is even stronger (perhaps even
claustrophobic) as individual objects may no longer be complete strangers to us but rather bring with
them a plethora of memories associated with them. Think here of Goethe’s rumination that the
‘romantic aspect of a region’ is that ‘quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past’. Of
course, even places that we don’t know well may evoke this quiet sublimity; if the traces of the past
of that place are visibly and evocatively manifest in the physical landscape, as is the case at Stanton
Moor. In such places, does not the past seem to reveal itself in spatialised, embodied form? The

40
places in which we most regularly dwell also carry episodes from our personal biographies within
them in great abundance, episodes that tell also of our relationships with significant others. For
example, places may contain objects that remind us of recently deceased relatives or pets. If places
are, in the words of Proust, “like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality” then is it
any wonder that the thought of the loss of a place can fill us with as much fear and anxiety as the
loss of a loved one?

If, as Heidegger insists, the state of anxiety as it arises in man reveals the nothing that is the true
counterpart to being, should it come as any surprise that one might grieve so at the prospect of the
loss of a place? When we grieve at the looming demise of a pet, a person or a place we grieve
essentially over the thought of an absence; of a nothing where a being should be, or a nothing where
a place should be. In this sense, as Jeff Malpas (1999) writes, we are all of us engaged in a Proustian
search for time, for place and for a life. We search for a history, sometimes obsessively. We dwell in
a place in order to forestall the nothing. It is not just those who live in treetops who do this, it is in
fact basic to dwelling. Except in perhaps the darkest periods of our lives we struggle against the
nothing and hold on to Being, a holding that can, indeed, stray to the possessive and dictatorial if we
do not begin to recognise our responsibilities towards the Other; a responsibility that, as Levinas
thought, may have its origins deeper than mere obligation. Indeed, as we shall see, it is in place first
of all that we recognise our responsibilities towards others.

Thus the loss of a homeplace, or of any place known well, can be traumatic and harrowing. Of
course, there are always exceptions, in some cases it may be that the loss of a homeplace is
experienced as a relief, as liberating, or even exhilarating. But even so, this latter prospect is surely
more likely to occur when an individual has voluntarily left a still-existing home place; that this
experience can be liberating is without doubt as anyone who has ever left their parental home well
knows! But it is harder to imagine anyone being invigorated by the thought of their homeplace
having being obliterated utterly and completely. The more sudden the severance of people from
place, the harder it is to come to terms with. Places are indeed rather like people in this respect.
Casey writes that “we mourn places as well as people, and as part of the process we must decathect
from both.” (Casey, 1993: 198) For the protestors at Stanton Moor, the process of decathexis was
relatively prolonged. That is, as we have seen, they were resolved to the ever-present possibility that
they might be some day evicted, although not without a fight. As it is for individuals and
communities so it is for humanity at large. In the epigraph to this section, Novalis wisely states that
philosophy is “really homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere in the world.” Humans strive
to be at home wherever they may be. The prospect of complete separation from history and nature,

41
of being lost, rootless and without a true home is, for all but the most Abrahamically minded
individuals, like some terrible nightmare. In the west most philosophers, and many geographers,
have been more like Odysseus than Abraham. The object has been to place human beings, to
discover their place, their home, in the great scheme of things. For example, Tim Creswell names
Yi-Fu Tuan as one geographer for whom the discipline is all about studying Earth as the home of
people and David Seamon as one for whom the home is an intimate place of rest away from the
hustle of the outside world. (Creswell, 2004: 24)

However, despite the meaningfulness that the concepts of place and home contain, is there not still
something pertinent in Levinas’s critique of place and of home? As Levinas recognizes, an
attachment to a home place that is too unwavering and too insensitive can lead ultimately only to
chauvinism and even fascism, a complete rejection of alterity and the absence of an ethics. In place
of the ontological certainty of place, then, Levinas proposes an ethics that, unbounded by place (or
any other ipseity) speaks of our original and unchosen responsibilities to Others that precedes
ontology. As Derrida has noted, however, there is some ambiguity in Levinas’s thought.
Specifically; how can the self act ethically on behalf of the Other if the Other is not first identified
as Other? Before ethical action can take place, the self must acknowledge and take measure of the
ontological gap that separates itself from the Other. Derrida writes that “Without this
acknowledgement, which is not a knowledge, or without this ‘letting-be’ of an existent (Other) as
something existing outside me in the sense of what it is (first in its alterity), no ethics would be
possible.” (Derrida, cited in Gauthier and Eubanks, 2005: 40) Similarily, it is hard to conceive an
ethical encounter with an Other or Others that does not actually take place. An ethics that does not
take into account Being and place results in a violence greater even than the violence of totalisation.
Indeed, “violence would reign to such a degree that it would no longer be able to appear and be
named.” (Ibid: 40) Therefore, it is suggested that Levinas takes his emphasis on the primacy of
ethics over ontology too far. We need an account of both ethics and ontology. We need an ethics of
place.

42
Why defend place?

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not
our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must
put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his
species must become his own.” Percy Bysshe Shelley

In his book An Ethics of Place, Mick Smith determines what an ethics of place is not. It is “not a call
for a return to rootedness, [ethics] is no more limited by topography than it is by modernity’s formal
rationality, or than it was by the walls of the ancient Greek polis.” Ethics is rather an anarchic
excess, a “love that refuses to be contained” by either walls or rationality or topography. (Smith,
2001: 215) Smith draws on Levinas and Irigaray to advocate an ethical relation to nature that is
expressed by neither “an anthropic erasure of difference or by the sublimation of the self in ecstatic
raptures.” Rather, a properly ethical relation to nature lies in a “creative tension” between the
expression of care and closeness and the conservation of a “space for the other’s being so that it
remains uncompromised by our presence.” (Ibid: 188) Smith criticises some reductive forms of
bioregionalism, where morality finds itself naturalized and hampered by an obsession with
boundaries and “a desire for Sameness and solidarity”. (Ibid: 214) The bioregionalist Kilpatrick
Sale, for instance, claims that people will respond to an environmental problem in a responsible way
only if they can see how the problem is connected to them directly and proximately. Smith’s
response, following Deborah Tall, is that a sense, and thus an ethics, of place will require a continual
act of imagination; an act of imagination which recognizes that our “community is widely scattered
[… and that we have] only our own brief intensities of common experience to bind us” (Tall, cited in
Ibid: 214) Ethics, from this standpoint, requires imagination and love. Just like Shelley points out in
the above epigram; to be good we must “imagine intensely and comprehensively”. We must be able
to put ourselves “in the place of another, and of many others” and feel the “pains and pleasures” that
are not our own. In the quote, Shelley restricts this “great secret”, this act of imagination and love, to
members of our own species. An even more daring act of imagination might extend this gesture of
love and empathy to members of other species. Smith himself calls the development of this moral
identity an ecological habitus; a habitual and heartfelt relationship with the Other.

Whatever place we find ourselves in, we find ourselves in the midst of Others; some are of the
human variety, but many more are not. Like Smith’s book, the aim of this paper is to elucidate a
defence of place, an ethics of place that is more than any nostalgic commitment to authenticity and

43
rootedness. Smith concludes that such an ethical relation could take the form of a passivity that “lets
others be” and which “might be envisaged in spatial terms as giving others room to develop and not
shaping their existence solely for our own instrumental ends.” (Ibid: 219) Dwelling on the earth in
this way requires calling upon an ego that is far from self-possessive. It calls for an ego that does not
seek to constitute itself through the eradication or assimilation of all that is different from it, either
by negating the Other in a reductive manoeuvre that reduces it to the status of ‘standing-reserve’ or,
equally, by attempting to attain some kind of mystical union with the Other. Certainly, the idea of
union may compel and tantalise us (let us cast our minds back to Proust’s young narrator, Marcel,
who stood in the middle of a country path trying in vain to decipher the reality that lay hidden
underneath his various sense impressions) but its inevitable impossibility soon steers us back into
our selves. As Marcel himself puts it,

“so arduous was the task imposed on my conscience by these impressions of form or
scent or colour- to try to perceive what lay hidden beneath them- that I was not long in
seeking an excuse that would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort and to spare myself
the fatigue that it involved.” (Proust, 2002: 214)

That the human wills to know what is hidden behind the façade that the nonhuman Other presents to
us (for them to emerge, so to speak, out of the twilight) is part of a healthy and enquiring attitude.
This typically Faustian attempt to discover things as they are in themselves is surely preferable to an
exploitive desire to put things always to the service of oneself or to find in them merely a pleasure,
aesthetic or otherwise. Marcel himself finally does find a way to relieve himself of the frustration of
not being able to peer through the veneer of things to the things in themselves; though the use of the
poetic word. This is, of course, the characteristic Romantic venture. In poetry, the self seems to truly
approach what is outside of it. But to approach is not necessarily to meet. The Other remains
tantalisingly upon the horizon, often appearing fragile and mortal (a fact that the self can readily
appreciate as it itself is a fragile and mortal being), and often seeming to call for our care. Perhaps a
properly ethical relation lies not so much in a radical passivity (the self just letting the Other be) but
in the never-quite-consummated approach to the Other; the striving of the self to meet the Other
curtailed by the graceful reverting of the self back towards the self before that Other can be (if it ever
can be) totally subsumed.

Let us think this through practically for a moment. As living beings, humans cannot but help
impacting upon the environment around them and thereby directly or indirectly affecting the lives of
Others. This is the case even when humans live within the simplest means imaginable; for example,

44
as the Nine Ladies protestors do in their huts. We have no choice but to breathe the air, consume the
fruits of the earth, excrete and make shelter. This is the absolute minimal, but most of us can
scarcely envisage such an abstemious existence as this, one in which we do not shape and mould the
outside world for any aesthetic or hedonistic purpose whatsoever. The possibility of all humankind
willingly returning to such a minimal existence is doubtful, indeed almost certainly out of the
question. Also, as it proves impossible to remain completely passive with regards to the Other even
if such a way of life was to become popular, then it only remains that we as humans can at least
decide how much consumption and exploitation is too much. As Casey pointed out earlier, we can let
nature lead us on this dilemma; we can learn how to live a balanced and responsible life from closely
observing the land and the biosphere. But ultimately, the land can speak only if we are willing to
listen.

As we saw earlier, the organic concept as developed in the writings of the early Romantics sought to
unify the natual, physical world and the mental world into an organic whole. In this model, nature is
the absolute and the mind is one part, the most highly developed part, of that whole. There is only a
difference in degree and not a distinction in kind, between the mental and the physical. According to
the Frühromantik, the mental activity of the genius (the artist or the philosopher) is but nature
coming to its self awareness; nature remains indeterminate and inchoate without humanity. But as
our exploration of the complex relations between people and place at Stanton Moor has shown,
nature is a double mirror; although nature may reach the level of self awareness only in humanity
(and with the possible exception of certain ‘higher’ animals we have no reason to believe that this is
not the case) it is also true that humans can discover their own self when exposed to nature. Let us
recall the ecstatic Nine Ladies visitor who found there the soul she always thought she had! And let
us remember the comment of Sarah the protestor, who was empowered by the thought of saving a
piece of nature. But we do not find in nature only a ‘kindred spirit’ as it were; we might even find a
match for our intellect. Even the political philosopher Luc Ferry, who as we shall see is very hostile
to forms of ecology that divinise and romanticise nature, permits that nature often proves “superior
to us in intelligence” in the finality and purposefulness that a complex ecosystem displays. (Ferry,
1995: 143)

Having acknowledged the significant part that the nonhuman plays in our lives, it nevertheless
remains accurate to say that the human capacity for self awareness and the facility to reflect on and
transcend our own nature distinguishes us as a living being more complex than any other. Though it
is true that humans are a part of nature, it doesn’t follow that we are just any old part of nature,
interchangeable with any other part. After all, with the possible exception of the Earth’s trees and

45
other flora, which have fashioned for the planet a breathable and hospitable atmosphere, humans
have transformed their environment to a far greater degree than other organisms. These capacitates
for transformation and rapid change lend to humankind a somewhat precarious destiny. We may use
our extraordinary capacities of imagination and love to live in friendship with and amongst
nonhuman Others (that we may never truly know), or we may continue to believe that the earth
serves man and remain, as Levinas wished, ‘masters of the mystery’. As the most complex
manifestation of nature, the Romantics understood quite well that humans bore a heavy burden. With
the benefit of an aesthetic and moral education that taught the individual how to truly love what is
not of themselves as a family, as community, we might at least approach wholeness. Friedrich
Shlegel once wrote that to “follow nature” is the only precept of a moral education. (See Beiser,
1996: 152) Why did he say this? Because Shlegel knew that despite humanity’s elevated position,
nature remains the best teacher of all. Nature can teach us how to live well…

“Follow nature therefore means: just as nature is organized, so organize yourself.”

If humans are only a part of nature, albeit a uniquely complex part of it, can humans also be free?
The Romantics certainly thought so, though they could not allow freedom in the radical sense
posited by Kant’s spontaneous freedom or Fichte’s concept of self-positing, in which the self acts
without any determination by a prior cause. The Romantic conception of freedom was one in which
the self was free only in its identification with nature. Freedom and necessity are not opposed but are
truthfully one. As part of divine and absolute nature, which is indubitably free, true human freedom
arises from “sharing or participating in divine necessity, in seeing that in all my actions the divine
acts through me.” (Beiser, 2003: 151) To put this another way; considered as merely an isolated part,
the human being (or any other being) may seem determined, but because the whole is free, all of us
as parts share in this universal freedom. Because we share in this freedom, ethical actions do make
sense in so much as they tend towards preserving and indeed advancing that freedom. By acting
ethically we not only respect other beings but we are respecting that whole of which we are an
expression.

Although the Frühromantik did not explicitly have an environmental ethics in the sense that we
recognise today, there is no harm in thinking through what this concept might mean from an
environmental perspective. The Earth has been likened by many ecologists to an organism in itself,
as is the case in James Lovelock’s Gaia theory16. This organism is itself comprised of many parts of

16
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars,
the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be

46
varying sizes and complexity. Considered as a part, a single human being seems hopelessly
determined, dwarfed by the Earth and leading a tiny existence that is little more noteworthy than that
of a blade of grass. When the whole is taken into account, however, in place of determinism we find
a glorious and creative and imaginative freedom. Considered in gargantuan time scales, the Earth has
continually thrown up surprises; forests, oceans, entire species and other expressions that were once
not there and some day will cease to be. We humans are an expression and manifestation of nature
that happens to display remarkable aptitude in the acts of imagination and love, as well as in acts of
incomparable cruelty, and as such we are neither spontaneously free nor outrightly determined. In a
sense, all of our actions, including the development of technologies, the enclosing of the land and the
extraction of minerals for our buildings, could be seen as an extension of nature’s freedom. Nature is
here simply throwing up even newer surprises, via us as intermediaries. This is really a consistent
view if one accepts the premises of the organic concept. However, as lovers, as well as creators and
destructors, it surely behoves us to preserve those human and nonhuman Others that accompany us
and share our great journey; our beloveds, who suffer pain or even die as a result of our actions. To
do this, we must do as Shlegel says and ‘follow nature’. This isn’t the same thing as submitting to
nature or returning to a primitive, ‘natural’ state. Rather it means to look to the rest of nature as a
teacher, as a propaedeutic for our correct and healthy development, and to organize ourselves
accordingly. It means, as Shelley pleaded, to go ‘out of our own nature’ and to be able to put
ourselves ‘in the place of another’. That Shelley specifically mentions the word ‘place’ here is
significant. To put ourselves in the place of another we must first know what it is to be placed. But
as we have seen; this is a basic experience we can all relate to.

It is suggested here that we come to learn our ethical responsibilities towards Others precisely in
places. In all but the most barren of places, we feel ‘surrounded’ by Others, even if those Others are
not even organic beings. Presently, for example, this author feels surrounded by a laptop, numerous
books, a chair, and further away a cat washing itself and happily minding its own business. At
Stanton Moor, the eco-protestors have become accustomed to living amongst trees, birds and the
occasional wild deer. Even things that are not within the immediate range of our perception have an
effect on our experience. Right now, this author is dimly aware of activity on the adjacent street and
the passing of cars. On one level these are minor irritancies, but on another they provide a strange
and particular comfort; for at least one knows where one is! How disconcerting if one was to look
out of the window and see not a street with cars and people, but a vast and barren cavity. At Stanton
Moor, the protestors feel the presence of the stone circle on the moor above them. They know that

thought of as a single organism. Note that the ensuing discussion does not necessarily coincide with Lovelock’s own
opinions; these are the present author’s own thoughts.

47
somewhere just out of view, wild deer are hidden. At Thursbitch, Jack Turner comes home knowing
the standing stones and the stream will remain just where he left them. Sal returns to Thursbitch
again and again because it holds her in its kind embrace and steadfastly refuses to be forgotten.
Marcel stands in the middle of his country path, smelling the heavenly scent of the blossoms and
seeing the sunlight gleam on the stones. By being amongst Others, we learn to live amongst Others.
This is why it is such a travesty that so many children do not get to spend time in wild (or at least
relatively wild) places and instead live in the world of Facebook.17 This is why Heidegger was
prescient when he warned that modern technology’s tendency to ‘enframe’ the earth would be
dehumanizing to such an extent that man himself would begin to lack objective presence in an
objectless mileu.18 Ethical encounters do not occur in a void. This is a call for the importance of
place for ethics, not as some authentic and unchanging ground for ethics, but as the site in which
encounters with the Other can take place; where relation takes place. In this vision, place ceases to
be a jealously guarded territorial home and takes on the aspect of an Inn; where two or more
unfamiliar travellers sojourn for a while. Place thus conceived becomes not the site of a sedentary
and bounded conservatism but the very site in which the ethical and the political arises. Or, as Jeff
Malpas puts much the same point, “the idea of place does not so much bring a certain politics with it,
as define the very frame within which the political itself must be located.” (Malpas, 1999: 198) In
the view of this author, subjective and humanistic conceptions of place and relational, ontological
theories alike do not do justice to this intricate ethical topography.

One might be asking at this point if such an ethical theory is suitable only for those most intimate
encounters, in which the Other(s) are physically proximate to one’s self. This is not the case. Edward
Casey stipulates that place is an ‘eidetic singularity’, that is, “singular enough to be unique to a given
occasion and yet wide-ranging enough to exceed what is peculiar to it alone on that same occasion.”
(Casey, 1996: 34) If this is the case, then it may be that is through our placed-based experience of
the world that we can come to be aware of our responsibilities not only to those to those in proximity
(in the same place as one) but also to those in ‘distant places’; for how could we imagine those
disaster stricken, disease stricken and hunger stricken people in distant lands otherwise but in place?
A place superficially very different from the ones that the Western academic frequents, but
nevertheless a place that presents itself to its inhabitants in all of its contiguous ‘placeness’. This
notion takes on a sudden urgency when we realise that our actions can have a wholesale effect on
those distant places in which Others live. Just think for a moment of those islands that are threatened
17
Facebook: A web-based social networking site.
18
Enframing (Gestell): Another Heideggarian term, related to ‘standing-reserve’. Gauthier writes that enframing is “the
process by which man endeavours to impose a framework upon nature in order to force it to produce consumable
material.” (Gauthier, 2004: 129) For Heidegger, the danger of modern technology lies in that it enframes to the extent
that even man will one day become nothing but a standing reserve, i.e. dehumanized.

48
with submersion due to the increase in sea levels associated with climate change.19 A place-learnt
(but not place-bound) ethics seems all the more appropriate in this context. As Casey himself writes:

“A new sense of responsibility emerges in which human beings have an abiding

commitment to respect the earth – i.e. it’s landed (and aqueous) places – as well as
members of other species. Even our responsibility to humans is ultimately to people in
places, not to unplaced persons existing in a void.” (Casey, 1993: 264)

If the conception of place put forward in this paper seems to go against the grain of some
contemporary geographical discourse that desires to rid place of all of its associations with
authenticity and sentimentality, it does so to emphasize the ultimate impossibility of such a removal.
As Casey states, we are placelings as much as we are beings; “we come into the world as already
placed there.” (Casey, 1996: 18) Of course this doesn’t mean that all places are defendable and
innocent; certainly not all places are rare and delicate and wonderful in the manner described by
Proust. Of course place does not only fold inwards but also folds outwards in relation to other places.
However, all this shows is that we would do well to take each place as an eidetic singularity (neither
a particular nor a universal but somewhere in between) and, furthermore, as a feature of the world
that is never completed and never closed.

So finally, let us ask; why defend place? The Romantics came to believe that though humans may
never realize the idea of a perfect world, ‘the highest good’, we still must ever strive towards it,
because only then do we approach it.20 The Romantics, along with Jack Turner, lived in an age when
the spectre of modernity was just beginning to appear in the forms of enclosure and the ‘Industrial
Revolution’. Today, we live in an age where humanity cannot be said to live in equilibrium with the
rest of nature. The Romantics passionately believed reconciliation and harmonization between
humans and the rest of nature to be the ideal, an attitude adopted by many of today’s environmental
activists. If, as this paper maintains, the human self meets and learns to love nonhuman Other(s) in
place first of all then surely this is an appropriate rationale for abiding by place, defending place and
keeping a place open for the perfection of that impossible ideal.

19
There is plenty about this issue on the internet. For an article about the first inhabited island to disappear beneath
rising sea levels see www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/disappearing-world-global-warming-claims-
tropical-island-429764.html
20
Idea (Idee) is used here in the sense that the Frühromantik used it; the Kantian sense. For Kant, an idea prescribes an
ideal or a goal for human conduct or enquiry. This idea can be approached but never attained.
The highest good: A fundamental concept of ethics dating back to Aristotle, producing various answers. For Aristotle,
“the highest good is defined in terms of human excellence, the development of characteristic human virtues.” Beiser
asserts that in “fundamental respects, the romantics go back to the Aristotelian tradition.” (Beiser, 2003: 26)

49
Coda: The Wanderer

“The world is still imperfect. A beginning always must be made, therefore, to perfect it.
There must be causality in the whole, then, that of course coheres with the whole. This is
no other than the causality of love. By love everything began, and by love it will be
perfected.” Friedrich Schlegel.

Humanism or barbarism: this is the stark choice that Luc Ferry (1995) sets out for the future of
humankind at the end of his book, The New Ecological Order. According to Ferry, the entire world
of the mind (and consequently of human culture) is endangered by the emergence of radical ecology,
which considers culture as a mere prolongation of nature.21 For Ferry, this dangerous theory papers
over all that is truly special in human culture and jeopardizes our democratic societies and
institutions. Deep ecology is fundamentally undemocratic, according to Ferry, and as a
fundamentalism it only fills the void left by the demise of other ideologies. It represents a new
ideological order that, left unchallenged, would seize the hearts of those battle hardy militants who
have been “left in a state of shock” by the “death of communism and leftism”. (Ferry, 1995: 134)
Ferry traces the origins of ecological fundamentalism via Romanticism and National Socialism. He
argues against the thesis that Romanticism was a synthesis of Classicism and Sentimentalism and
instead asserts that the Romantics were always more Sentimental than Classical, with their emphasis
on sentiment at the expense of reason. Ferry shows how this tradition was upheld and continued in
Nazi ecology. Here, the ‘German’ image of a primitive and pure nature was opposed to a distinctly
‘French’, humanist and Classical preference for a cultivated and controlled nature, full of artifice.
Deep ecology is the latest movement to hoist the flag of Romanticism; that “ridiculous and
dangerous” archaism. (Ibid: 145) Ferry is particularly scathing of radical antimodernism and any
idea of a ‘divinization’ of nature, which always “implies a rejection of modern culture, suspected of
causing man’s uprootedness.” (Ibid: 130) He goes on to criticise the concept of a normative
antihumanist ethics; a contradiction in terms because it fails to recognise that it is always humans
who most ultimately judge nature’s value. He does not deny that nature can be beautiful, useful or
even generous. His point is that ethical, political or legal ends do not reside in nature itself, which
knows no moral finality. We therefore cannot avoid the subjective or humanist moment as the deep
ecologists suppose we should. It is always humans who decide in the end what is good and what is
bad.

21
Partly, but not solely, influenced by the Gaia hypothesis, the phrase ‘deep ecology’ was first coined by Arne Næss in
1973. Deep ecology places greater value on non-human species, ecosystems and processes in nature than established
environmental and green movements.

50
Despite painting a picture of deep ecology with a very broad brush, Ferry’s thesis is very incisive in
places. It is true that the world of the mind is endangered by some variants of deep ecology. It is true
that the subjective moment can never be avoided, that an ‘I’ must re-enter into any encounter and
every ethical decision, just as there must be an ‘Other’ that is identified as ‘Other’. Without the
possibility of communication, we cannot know what this Other wants, and to pretend that we do is to
perform an unwitting act of anthropocentrism. In this regard, Ferry cites Philip Elder, who discusses
a proposed development in a valley named Mineral King. Many environmental activists, writes
Elder, suppose that the interests of natural objects are opposed to development. “But how do we
know? After, all isn’t it possible that Mineral King would be inclined to welcome a ski slope after
having remained idle for millions of years? (Cited in Ibid: 131) I would not go as far as this. Can we
really say that a valley full of many thousands of trees, each unfurling thousands of leaves and buds,
each involved in a constant and complex process of photosynthesis is in any way idle? It is my belief
that the essence of the universe is creativity, or life. All things strive to live and to exist in opposition
to the unwelcome possibility of not existing. Therefore I would speculate that Mineral King, or
Stanton Moor, or any other place full of such creative living things would prefer to exist over and
above not existing, if given the choice. Nevertheless, it still remains true that humans are the ones
who ultimately judge. As this is so, we must judge with love. We must judge, I would argue, in
favour of life; as much varied and abundant life as is possible.

Ferry is, however, wholly incorrect in his assessment of the Romantics. As I hope has been shown
throughout this paper, the early German Romantics were not antimodernists and neither were they
overly sentimental. Though they saw very clearly that humans were a part of nature, they didn’t see
them as inevitably determined by Nature. To put it simply, we are not a cog in a machine but a
creative, living expression of an organic whole. Though Romanticism has undoubtedly been
misappropriated and distorted over the years, it is nevertheless the case that in its original form
Romanticism embodied a way of looking at the world that valued both culture and nature just as it
valued reason alongside feeling and sentiment. I suggest, therefore, that rediscovering and
rejuvenating Romanticism is a viable and valuable exercise in our theoretically tired times, not just
for historians of political philosophy such as Frederick Beiser, but for all those working in the social
sciences and humanities. This is not least the case in geography, a discipline which is all about
understanding our home and our place on the Earth. As David Lambert has said, as a subject “it
encourages to wonder, not only at the beautiful world and its raw and savage power, but at amazing
human possibility and diversity.” (Lambert, 2006) In Romanticism we have a worldview that
recognises both this power of nature to affect us and make us wonder and which recognises the

51
extraordinary possibilities of the human, the only being that has, for better or for worse, made its
own world for itself upon this Earth.

Ferry states that ‘great works’ effectively “reconcile, each time in an original fashion, the separation
and the rootedness which the avant-garde and Romanticism isolate and unilaterally thematize.” The
implication here is that in Romantic works we find only rootedness and in the avant-garde only
separation. But there is at least one famous Romantic work of art that exactly accomplishes the
reconciliation; Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. In this image we
see only the back of the wanderer in question. Standing
perilously close to the edge of his rocky outcrop he gazes out
onto the sublime and impenetrable landscape before him. From
the fog, the craggy summits of mountains barely emerge. The
wanderer is confronted by a raw and incalculable nature that
keeps its deepest secrets eternally hidden. Yet look at how the
wanderer stands; confident and erect, masterful even, on top of
the highest peak. The wanderer’s presence cannot be denied, for
he is, after all, at the very centre of the painting. Just as nature in
this scene is not reducible to the wanderer, so is the wanderer not
reducible to nature. Though the wanderer is a part of nature just
like the mountains and the fog, only the wanderer has the Fig 5 Wanderer Above the
Sea of Fog
capacity to reflect on his self and to gaze upon a wild scene and
thereby unite what was previously inchoate. Only he can purposively strive to grasp that scene,
however ungraspable it may prove. Only he wanders and wonders through life. The wanderer is
shown here to be at once rooted in the earth but at the same time seemingly separated.

The human is the wanderer who is at home. The human is at home precisely in its wanderings and in
its Faustian strivings. We may not be ‘masters of the mystery that the earth breaths’ but we have
certainly delved into the mystery, and our dabbling has almost broken the Earth. To repair our
broken world we must heed the Romantics’ advice, taking inspiration from nature and acting with
love, for, as Shlegel said “by love everything began and by love it will be perfected.” We must not
reject the notion of a Utopia either, for without it we are lost and flailing. Utopia is that perfected
world which directs all of our wanderings and for which we should aim, with the knowledge that we
may never attain it. Indeed, like a rainbow that shimmers colourfully but only briefly in a waterfall,
our striving must fail. But it is this striving that marks a life worth living. In the current storm, where

52
the certainties of modernity are tossed aside like driftwood and our future seems uncertain, we find
ourselves needing some firmness to hold onto…

“But with what splendour from this storm emerges

The coloured rainbow’s constant flux, now brightly
Painted, now with the misty shadows merges.
A cooling haze around it gathers lightly;
It shows us that our striving for perfection
Must fail. But then we pause, and see more rightly:
Our life is in that colourful reflection.”
Goethe, Faust

53
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Picture credits

Figs. 1 and 2 are from the Stanton Moor Conservation Plan (Mcguire and Smith, 2007)

Figs. 3 and 4 are from the website of the Stanton Lees Action Group, accessible at
http://wyrdswell.co.uk/stantonmoor/index.html

Fig. 5 is sourced from Wikipedia and is accessible at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

The quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley on page 43 is from ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Poems and Prose, edited by
Timothy Webb (1995) and published by Everyman.

The quotations on page 2 and 53 are from Goethe’s Faust, translated by John R. Williams (1999) and published by
Wordsworth editions.

57