Poetry, paths, and peatlands: integrating poetic inquiry within landscape heritage research

Abstract

On the first page of The making of the English landscape, W.G. Hoskins states that ‘poets make the best topographers’. This speaks to the long-standing expression of human feelings, understandings, and experiences of landscape through poetry. In this article, I build from this idea of poetry as a way to write about landscapes to explore how poetic inquiry can be a powerful and appropriate method to research landscapes and their heritage. Using examples from my own research practice of the creation of new poems through a process called poetic transcription, I argue that poetic inquiry is an, as-yet, under-used approach within landscape heritage research. Furthermore, poetry’s capacity to express the plural, affective, sensorial, and subjective dimensions of engagement with landscapes and their heritage offers potential within studies informed by phenomenological and more-than-representational perspectives.