In Tintagel, crowds funnel into hamlets with parking and a bus route beside whatever charges admission. Locals look over counters and kitchen windows wondering if they should let out their place to afford to live through winter. Dog walkers prance confidently behind the non-human who belongs anyplace outdoors (and indoors in most of the countryside of England). On the walk there is a church, a Celtic quiet place¹For more on the Celtic quiet place movement check out their website. at the end of a single lane. Inside, seclusion; outside, a car park. Non-Christians wonder if they are ‘allowed’ inside a place that is largely vacant at any given time. Nirmal Puwar lends a tool to view how the sorting of bodies on occurs before belonging (to the terrain) is established. Puwar named two conditions when a body out of place: “disorientation and amplification.”²Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (2004), 33. When a small presence out of place is noticed it carries the potential of presenting “a territorial threat, with associated metaphors of war, battle and invasion.”³Puwar (2004), 144–45.  The boundary between pilgrim, tramp, tourist and local cannot be deciphered so custodians set their limits at ‘for all’. Puwar explains “those who are alike in social background and … bodily style are more likely to be endorsed and supported.”⁴Puwar (2004), 153.

Walks often start with attention divided, one part focused on following a strict path, another still caught in what brought you here. What is established in these moments is often what is carried throughout. Arriving to the church a sign invites passersby without discretion. The implication is all are welcome, though everyone arrives from their own direction and expectation. Another sign indicates none can sleep here. A pattern of long distance walkers has established that because pilgrimage churches have historically welcomed travellers, this one does as well. The church is a building at the end of a long road of institutionalised religion. The bluff nearby, one to ‘tune into’ the landscape and walk, is formed by weather and sea water much longer than it has been influenced by feet and paw. Who is prepared enough, equipped enough, unobtrusive enough, and unexamined by others moving along a on a path to not stand out (including yourself)? Puwar’s Parliamentarian, the one comparing their experience to “walking into a pub in Cornwall” persists: who is supported, who belongs, in a landscape, quiet place and a form of mobility when spiritual intention, blood-in-the-soil, financial independence, ethnicity, or physical ability runs against a current of perceived and actual belonging.

Puwar presented a template calibrated for the institution, asking whether a place is hostile in specifically racial terms. It is an important problem to investigate; the stakes are high, and the investment is whether this preservation for ‘the commons’ are for all the people it claims to support. Puwar’s landscape is Parliament’s. Shifting to the local view, asking whether the cliff is racist, the way one asks if the pub is suitable for a Parliamentarian produces something else altogether. It is not to invalidate the situation in the pub – what Puwar asks on the cliff opens up a conversation that sizes up incomers, folds in a foundational myth and problematises both a physical and cultural landscape. The analytic carried up the path arrives already deciding who counts as out of place, holding a verdict on who is admissible before the walker sets a boot down – something that reads reductive from a chair and computer screen but less so on the side of an iconic cliff. The framework contests the ground itself as much as it does anyone on it.

At the end of “Staring at the Sea” – conducted on patch of grass, adjacent to the South West Coastal Path, right at the edge of a cliff, the Interactor has taken an uncommon action making their (and the walker and dog going by) presence out-of-place. Meanwhile the interactor views a church, the sea, hilltops, nearby hamlets and the ruined Tintagel castle. The history of the castle and adjacent settlements link to a series of medieval human impressions – which is, in practice, less significant to the casual visitor who associates the place with Arthurian mythology. The land and village only matters in as much as it relates the views of the once residents of the hilltop jutting out from the mainland. A once and future king battles for the integrity of an ethical England all premised on values of equal distribution of power and a quality of life that would otherwise be challenged by foreign influence. Puwar comments of this indirectly via Stuart Hall, who considers how national belonging rests on “a story which locates the origin of the nation, the people and their national character so early that they are lost in the mists of, not ‘real’, but ‘mythic’ time — like basing the definition of the English as ‘free-born’ on the Anglo-Saxon Parliament.” ⁵Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity: SAGE Publications (1996), 295.; Cited by Puwar (2004), 35.[/mfn].

On this headland, the mist is not a metaphor, the mist literally effects the views taken in. The landscape permits the reading and perception of this place. Down the path is not only Arthur’s castle – it is a tale of foundational presence that leads to today. It is also not Arthur’s castle at all – it is his birthplace. The castle is that of Uther and Igraine, his parents as well as his older sister before him, Morgan. It is a point where folklore, pagan influence and a bit of magic birthed a new nation. In the history of (mythological Britain) that teaches how an individual, Arthur, got here before anyone: a free-born islander founds a nation now sold on postcards and chalice, found in verse and novel. Belonging is reproduced for mass consumption, adjudicated against an origin that no one can prove – only speculate about. The archive is mythic, nothing can contradict it – the landscape is fixed–guarded and protected for continuity. The act of that speculation is what matters here, enabled by the activities that bring attention back to the tension of placing which framework where. What does and does not really belong?