David Cooper is a writer and academic who is preoccupied with creative and/or critical writing about place.
His literary critical research began with a PhD at Lancaster University entitled ‘Staying Put: Norman Nicholson and the Poetics of Place and Space’. He has since published widely in the interdisciplinary field of literary geographies with his many essays exploring such topics as the relationship between literature and cartography, the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the town of Millom as a site of post-industrial tourism. He is currently writing a book on the ‘immersiveness’ of contemporary place writing and is co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies.
Over recent years, David has increasingly turned to creative practices to think about place, and its many meanings, with his publications including a creative-critical deep mapping of Hayling Island (with Mish Green) and a collaborative re-imagining of Center Parcs (with Amelia Crouch). He has also recently published autobiographical essays on St John’s Beacon in Liverpool and the experience of immersion during the national lockdown.
David is a Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University where he co-directs the Centre for Place Writing (with Rachel Lichtenstein). Having moved around Cumbria during his twenties, he has lived in Lancaster for over a decade.
Further information:
Twitter: @DrDavidCooper
Centre for Place Writing
WORKS
‘The Duddon Estuary: the Myriad Lines of its Relations’
I’ve been coming to the Duddon for almost half of my life. It was a deep thrill, then, when Irene Rogan got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in collaborating in ‘Unpublished Tour’: a project that promised to create a polyphonic deep mapping of the estuary and its environs. Whilst plotting my contribution, I happened to be reading Lines: A Brief History by the influential anthropologist Tim Ingold; and, as a result, I couldn’t help but think about the Duddon Estuary – and my relationship to it – as a complex entanglement of lines. Drawing upon Ingold’s thinking, my contribution takes the form of an essay which is structured around six first-person fragments, or ‘Life Lines’, that reflect on the thickening of my relationship with the estuary over the past twenty years. Crucially, these autobiographical reflections are interspersed with direct quotations, taken from a range of bureaucratic texts, which offer alternative framings of the Duddon Estuary as a landscape of lines: from the shoreline to political boundaries, from the proposed bridge to the railway line. The essay also contains a series of images: stills from Laurence Campbell’s short film Sing to Encounter Me; a photograph from Irene Rogan; and a reproduction of J M W Turner’s ‘Duddon Sands’. The intention, in moving beyond the purely autobiographical, has been to highlight ‘the entanglement of lines that weave together – often creating difficult-to-unpick knots – in the making of a place’.
Below is an extract from ‘The Duddon Estuary: the Myriad Lines of its Relations’ prefaced by a still from Sing to Encounter Me: a film that shares my preoccupation with the intersections of place, time, and memory. The full text of my essay can be accessed as a PDF.
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Read the texts in full:
David Cooper, ‘The Duddon Estuary: The Myriad Lines of its Relations’
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Life Line IV: Geometry (24 August 2021)
I got down on my hands and knees so that I could take in the detail. The next morning I was driving up to Millom for the first time in two years and I wanted to remind myself of the lay of the land. I found myself sounding out names when roaming over the map - Explorer OL6 (‘The English Lakes: South-Western Area’), South Sheet - spread out on our living room floor: Hawthwaite House, Nicle Wood, Greety Gate Marsh, Bullstone Bed, High Haume Farm, Waterblean, Whelpshead Crag, Pear Tree Beck, Tippins Lane, Blea Beck, Stoup Dub, Thwaite Yeat, Mouzel Farm, Boothwaite Nook. I smiled at the functional matter-of-factness of others: Wet Meadow, Park Plantation, Wall End, Southfield, Bailiff Ground, Clay Lake, Round Hills, and Watery Crag.
I was also drawn to those markings that are used to ‘join locations of equal elevation’: contour lines.[i] Earlier on, I’d come across an article about the YouTuber, Tom Davies, who uses GPS tracking to attempt to cross vast landscapes – entire countries even – in a direct line.[ii] Hunched in our house in Lancaster, I cut across the contours as I imagined my own improbable route from Black Dub on the coast to the top of Black Combe: I went through High Layriggs and past Giant’s Grave, across the railway line and over the A5093, through Whicham to Parsonage Breast before finally reaching the top to take in ‘the line of Erin’s coast’.[iii]
If you momentarily blur your vision, the eye is drawn to an orangey lacuna slap bang in the centre of OL6: Duddon Sands. Refocus, though, and it becomes clear that this cartographic space is, in fact, rich with geographical data. Rotate your head 90°, vertically arranged text on both sides of the estuary – from Shaw Marsh in the north-west to Askam Pier in the south-east – highlights the line, or thereabouts, of ‘Mean High Water’. In the moment of the map’s making, therefore, the tide was clearly out. Then, right in the centre of this space, in the centre of the map, is a small rectangular box:
On the unfolded cartographic plane, the estuary is an entanglement of lines. Blue ones curve, come together, and pull apart again as the Duddon Channel and its tributaries are shown to flow seawards towards and around Haverigg Spit. Cutting across these blues is a series of green dashed lines. Some of these lines run parallel, more or less, to the eastern shore of the estuary, connecting Foxfield and Angerton and Dunnerholme. Others are pretty much horizontal, linking east with west: Askam to Millom, Sand Side to The Hill. The estuary as geometry. Bridleways. Desire paths, across the floor of the estuary, that have made the Sands a site of connectivity rather than rupture. Over the years, of course, there have been countless attempts to impose an utilitarianly direct line over the top of the Sands in the form of a road bridge or barrage. The map confirms, however, that, for now, none of these plans has seen the light of day.
To map, of course, is always a political act. As I started to fold the OL6 away, I spotted more lines in the sandy space. Again, they were dashed; but this time they were grey rather than green. These lines weren’t paths of desire but administrative borders: marks on the map separating Copeland from Barrow, one local authority from the next. This estuary has been a site of connection. The grey dashed line was a reminder, however, that the Sands has also been a site of invisible division and, up until the boundary changes of the 70s, separated the historic counties of Cumberland and Lancashire. In The Song of the Earth, the literary scholar Jonathan Bate - in a discussion of what he calls the ‘critical regionalism’ that informs Wordsworth’s Duddon sonnets - describes county boundaries as ‘pressure-points’. [iv] The lines on the map, then, act as visual reminders that the spatial history of the estuary has always been knotty: an inextricable intertwining of the physical and the practical and the political and the poetic.
That night, before I went to sleep, I had a thought: if I was to go out into the middle of the Sands, and stop at a point marked on the map by the grey dashed line, then where would I be standing? If I was looking north, when out in the estuary, then Copeland would be to my left and Barrow would be to my right. But what about the sandscape immediately beneath my feet? Who owns this line of land? Where would I be?
This text is copyright David Cooper 2021. Do not reproduce without seeking permission from the author (David Cooper) and publisher (Irene Rogan)
Notes
[i] Karen Rann and R. S. Johnson, ‘Chasing the Line: Hutton’s Contribution to the Invention of Contours’, Journal of Maps 15: 3 (2019), 48-56 (p. 48).
[ii] Rachel Hall, ‘Straight story? The YouTuber taking a direct route to success’, The Guardian, 11 June 2021 [Accessed: 17 October 2021].
[iii] William Wordsworth, ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, in Wordsworth: Complete Poetical Works, p. 174.
[iv] Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), p. 224.