geography

Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979)

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Fay Godwin
Top Withens by Ted Hughes

“Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding of Yorkshire on the 17th August 1930. Ted was a pupil at the Burnley Road School until he was seven, when his family moved to Mexborough, in South Yorkshire. As a child he spent many hours exploring the countryside around Mytholmroyd, often in the company of his older brother, Gerald, and these experiences and the influences of the landscape were to inform much of his later poetry.

In ‘The Rock’, an autobiographical piece about his early childhood, Hughes writes about Scout Rock, whose cliff face provided ‘both the curtain and back-drop to existence‘. The area continued to be a powerful source of inspiration in his poetry long after he had left Yorkshire. Hughes described the experience of looking out of the skylight window of his bedroom on 1 Aspinall Street onto the Zion Chapel. The Chapel is long gone, but Zion Terrace remains, its name a reminder of more God-fearing times.

In his classic and richly personal collection Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979), with photographs by Fay Godwin, Hughes suggests that the Calder Valley was originally the kingdom of Elmet, the last Celtic land to fall to the Anglo-Saxons. A second, revised edition was published as Elmet in 1994. 

Many of Hughes’s other poems also relate to the Calder Valley. ‘Six Young Men’, for example, was written at Hughes’s parents’ house at Heptonstall Slack in 1956. The poem describes a photograph belonging to Hughes’s father of six of his friends on an outing to Lumb Falls, taken just before the First World War.”

Text reproduced from https://www.theelmettrust.org/elmet-trust-ted-hughes/ (accessed 25/01/23). Images reproduced from Pinterest.

Seeing England

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In the seventeenth century antiquarianism was a well-respected profession and antiquarian works were in demand, particularly amongst the gentry, who were especially interested in establishing lineage and the descent of land tenure. Although intended primarily as a source of information about who owned what and where, they often contained fascinating descriptions of the English landscape. Charles Lancaster has examined the town and county surveys of this period and selected the most interesting examples to illustrate the variety and richness of these depictions. Organised by region, he has provided detailed introductions to each excerpt. Including such writers as John Stow, William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole, Daniel Defoe, Gilbert White and Celia Fiennes, this is a book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in both national and local history and to lovers of English scenery.

Text reproduced from https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Seeing_England/6E87AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 (accessed 14/01/24)

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Seeing_England/6E87AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Currently Reading

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Deep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora, and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. A deep map is a way to engage evidence within its spatio-temporal context and to provide a platform for a spatially-embedded argument. The essays in this book investigate deep mapping and the spatial narratives that stem from it. The authors come from a variety of disciplines: history, religious studies, geography and geographic information science, and computer science. Each applies the concepts of space, time, and place to problems central to an understanding of society and culture, employing deep maps to reveal the confluence of actions and evidence and to trace paths of intellectual exploration by making use of a new creative space that is visual, structurally open, multi-media, and multi-layered.

Currently reading

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In this journey across England’s most forbidding and mysterious terrain, William Atkins takes the reader from south to north, exploring moorland’s uniquely captivating position in our history, literature and psyche. Atkins’ journey is full of encounters, busy with the voices of the moors, past and present. He shows us that, while the fierce terrains we associate with Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles are very human landscapes, the moors remain daunting and defiant, standing steadfast against the passage of time.

The Gough Map

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The Gough Map

“The printer and publisher John Nichols described Richard Gough in a long tribute after his death as ‘the Father of British Topography’. More recently scholars have recognised him as the leading antiquary of his day. Gough was one of the first to recognise the importance of old maps in helping to understand the history of particular places and wrote a pioneering account of the development of British maps in the second edition of his British Topography (1780). This is the oldest map of Britain at the Bodleian Library, Oxfordshire (exact date unknown, approx. 14th Century). In addition, the topographical collection bequeathed by Gough to Oxford University in 1809 is one of the most important in the Bodleian Library, outstanding for the visual material received as well as the printed books and manuscripts. Among the maps is the earliest depiction of Britain in recognisable form (now known as the Gough Map) and large portions of the unique Sheldon tapestry map woven in the 1590s.

His Anecdotes of British Topography (1768) was the first comprehensive national bibliography of the subject and a remarkable achievement for one individual. It provided a gazetteer of sources relating to the local history and antiquities of each county, covering not just printed books and manuscripts but also maps and illustrations often with comments about dates, artists and when he acquired items. An enlarged second edition in two volumes was published in 1780 under the title of British Topography. Gough was one of the first to recognise the importance of old maps in helping to understand the history of particular places and wrote a pioneering account of the development of British maps in the second edition of his British Topography (1780).”

Text and image reproduced from https://www.bl.uk/picturing-places/articles/richard-gough-the-father-of-british-topography (accessed 21/07/23)

References for further research:

1] Richard Gough, British Topography. Or, an Historical Account of what has been done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland, London, J. Nichols and T. Payne, 1780. The completed part of the 3rd edition was destroyed in 1808 by a fire in Nichol’s printing works. However the Bodleian has a copy of the 2nd edition with useful later additions by Gough (Gough Gen.Top. 363–5).

2] Peter Barber, ‘King George III’s topographical collection: a Georgian view of Britain and the world’, in Kim Sloan and Andrew Burnett (eds), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, London, British Museum, 2003, pp. 158–65.

 3] The most useful guide to Gough’s topographical drawings is Maurice Barley, A Guide to British Topographical Collections, [London], Council for British Archaeology, 1974, pp. 95–8.