Small intimacies: Knowing and caring for (a) landscape

Horkan, Toby

Abstract

Spurn is a narrow sandy spit on the Holderness Coast of East Yorkshire, UK, jutting out into the mouth of the Humber Estuary, and is a place of rich ecological and historical interest. It is also an unpredictable and rapidly transforming landscape, changing on timescales more akin to the human than the geological. But this landscape also ‘moves’ in the sense that it inspires passionate responses in people, visible both in a significant body of art and literature, and also in the actions of those who have dedicated considerable time and effort to the place. This paper recognises Spurn as an affective landscape (Berberich et al. 2016), and will explore some of the ways in which people have come to develop deep, intimate relationships with Spurn in their engagements with the minutiae of the place, through practices such as walking, birdwatching, collecting, archiving, artmaking, and writing. It will also consider how the precarious nature of Spurn’s existence, highly vulnerable to erosion and flooding, intensifies the importance of these practices and relationships to those who feel connected with the place; how this vulnerability, in the words of a local historian, “makes you care more”. This paper will contend that there is much to learn from understanding these small but significant acts of knowing and caring for this precarious landscape, particularly with regards to other places that, like Spurn, will change beyond recognition or even disappear in the face of the escalating impacts of climate change.

Citation

Horkan, T. (2024, September). Small intimacies: Knowing and caring for (a) landscape. Paper presented at Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UKI) Biannual Postgraduate Conference 2024, University of Edinburgh

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UKI) Biannual Postgraduate Conference 2024
• Start Date: Sep 5, 2024
• End Date: Sep 6, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 23, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4870212
• External URL: https://asle.org.uk/events/conferences/