This paper tells the story of a single day's walking, alone, along the South West Coast Path in North Devon, England. Forms of narrative and descriptive writing are used here as creative and critical means of discussing the varied affinities and distanciations of self and landscape emergent within the affective and performative milieu of coastal walking. Discussion of these further enables critical engagement with current conceptualizations of self-landscape and subject-world relations within cultural geography and spatial-cultural theory more generally. Through attending to a sequence of incidents and experiences, the paper focuses upon the distinctive ways in which coast walking patterns into refracting orderings of subjectivity and spatialityinto for example, sensations of anxiety and immensity, haptic enfolding and attenuation, encounters with others and with the elements, and moments of visual exhilaration and epiphany. key words South West Coast Path landscape narrative affect subjectivity

In recent years, calls to`rematerialise', and plenary commentaries on the cogency of materiality, have become regular features of major anglophone geographical conferencesöparticularly the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers annual conference. Many paper sessions have sought, for example, to`rematerialise' different branches of human geography: rematerialising tourism geography, rematerialising historical geography, and so on. Such calls, of course, encompass multiple and often discordant conceptual positions and agendas. Nonetheless, their energy and insistence has led to a situation in which the entirety of postcultural-turn-anglophone geography has now been plausibly surveyed under the heading of a`materialist return' (Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004;Whatmore, 2006).Indeed, in the published literature this material turn or return has quickly spread to such an extent that its edges can already barely be glimpsed. Some clusterings are still visible: a vibrant material-cultures literature, for instance, focusing on meaningful practices of use and encounters with objects and environments (

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Working out from an encounter with a series of memorial benches at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, this paper develops an account of landscape in terms of absence and the non-coincidence of self and world. Arguing that recent work on the topics of landscape, embodiment, perception and material culture has tended to stress presence in various ways, I seek to explore instead here motifs of absence, distance, loss and haunting. The paper further attempts to combine descriptive and experiential accounts of the memorial benches and the views they open with conceptual arguments regarding the limits of certain phenomenological understandings of self and landscape. In particular, Derrida's critical reading of Merleau-Ponty is outlined and explored. The final substantive section of the paper then takes a further cue from the memorial benches to discuss what it terms the geographies of love. The argument here is that such geographies constitute a fracture forbidding any phenomenological fusion of self and world, entailing instead a simultaneous opening-onto and distancing-from. It is within the tension of this openness and distance, perhaps, that landscape, absence and love are entangled. … to be an ambulant point of view is a familiar mystery, but the existence of infinities of untenanted points of view is a destabilising thought. (Robinson 2006, 68) The landscape begins with a notion, however vague and confused, of distancing and of a loss of sight. (Nancy 2005, 53) The memorial benches at Mullion Cove (on the Lizard Peninsula, South-West England)The light ahead was so compelling that we were unstrapping our seatbelts, reaching for the doorhandles -we were halfway out of the car before it even came to a stop, turned into a small gravel recess there by the cliff-edge. Sometimes you'll turn a corner and a view will surprise you, but we ran right up to this one, and then stood, together and apart; different angles on the same encircling scene.We were standing high above Mullion Cove in the clear early morning, looking down into the cove, southward along the coastal cliffs and canyons, and far out to sea. We'd driven for some miles through nondescript farmland to arrive, suddenly, at this vivid, vertiginous scene. And now before us the mass of the sea in particular was a previously unseen and unthinkable electric blue, in response to which all the other colours of the spectrumand all of the other visible blues, too -shone bright and true. Parts of this could at least be described: pools of bottle-green near the rocky coast; further out, seams of indigo stretching across the water's surface. And out on the horizon blue sea and blue sky were pasted up absolutely proximate, absolutely distinct.The overall impression of the scene, though, transcended all particulars. The outlines and shadowed depths of the cliffs seemed archetypal: in all the transience of things, somehow this moment revealed the true and original textures of the