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The study of a herd can mark the point where ethnography and ethology meet. Here versions of`the social' hinge on relations between herders and herd. Anthropologists tell us this much. But can our understanding of a herd be extended by an awareness of the diverse geographies that coexisting humans and animals create? Or, to shift the direction of approach: what does a herd know, or care, for geography? Possible responses to these questions can identify the abstract and the conceptual in empirical encounters with occupied local habitats. The same responses benefit from mustering together the different registers of memory that humans and animals retain from their day-today operations, or leave behind as signs of erstwhile presence. Here, practical expressions of movement and settling are understood as one means to open out the herd's territory, and to present its meanings through the drawing together of earthy and worldly relations. This paper is an exercise in their possible narration. At its close, the animation of the herd offers occasion for comment on matters of conduct, form, and style in a longer heritage of landscape study. But you have not studied with your own eyes the long upward sweep of the land that lifts sheer at the northern corries and then once on high stretches out across the granite expanse of the mountain plateau, nor the stands of pines that survive on the lower slopes, nor the sharply incised ravine that must be crossed to reach the grazing grounds. And, since I cannot take for granted that you know

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action -understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources -present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship'. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old fieldcourse participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife. key words Scotland history of geography knowledge biography practice fieldwork

I IntroductionLately, geographers have been thinking hard about non-representational theory (NRT): thinking hard about its fi rst principles, about its promise of a politics and ethics reborn, and about the necessity of certain philosophical postures being struck. The clutch of constructive criticisms now emerging are wel-