Roving Places: A Spiritual Awakening is a solitary, site-specific, autotheoretical walking work moving through the folk-magical figures of a contested stretch of the north Cornish coast. The primary companions are Christine de Pizan, Nirmal Puwar, Chela Sandoval and Gloria Anzaldúa, with additional voices surfacing across the stretches. The title turns on the language of pilgrimage and awakening that this coast sells to its visitors, and holds it open rather than settling whether such an awakening is found, borrowed, or made. What follows in this Anarchive is a set of traces, not a record. The path here is to stay with what the body registers before it is explained. Doing so shows how a place is known through the senses when belonging cannot be proven and provenance cannot be checked. Roving Places carries feminist and decolonial frameworks onto ground where the conditions that ground them are largely absent, asking what those frameworks do once they are walked rather than wielded. The figures met along the way — a legend, a goddess, two nameless ladies, a witch — are approached through myth, history, translation, or nothing certain at all. Sustained engagement with displacement, rather than arrival, is offered here as the authentic relation to place.

What follows is a solo journey – there is no guide and no company, no one to whom the question of belonging can be put. The absence of a live companion is the test. The route runs from Tintagel to Boscastle and back, over cliff, cave, glen, staircase and mill, lasting as long as attention holds rather than a set clock. Ahead of reading any figure at all, the exercises turn the walker toward the mechanics of sensing — bearing, texture, scent, the tug of one direction against another. No two crossings match, each bent by weather, tide, and whoever is or is not there. What the section gathers, drawn from more than one return to the same coast and reaching across the seasons of that fieldwork, is geocoded audio and video, notes taken in the field, cut fragments and afterthoughts. It keeps sensed and read material in one place, for those who have made the walk and those who never will, and pairs with the zine, from which the pages open by QR while the walk is underway.

The digital surface carries the embodied experience only at a remove, conveying only half the story. Treat these pages as a trace of an encounter rather than the encounter itself. Do not assume that reading here reproduces walking there; hold these imaginings as your own, particular and partial and valuable on those terms. You can move at your own pace, dipping into any single entry to find connections, and follow a link when something wants context or a name. Use that when it helps, and remember that we each arrive knowing different things. This form exists to widen access to work that lives across print, live and digital settings at once. What it opens depends on what you bring, what you assume and how you prefer to meet an/Other. If you notice yourself resisting a figure or reaching to confirm what you already hold, stay with that moment: it marks where provenance, entitlement and belonging do their work in you.