Poetry, paths, and peatlands: integrating poetic inquiry within landscape heritage research

Abstract On the first page of The making of the English landscape, W.G. Hoskins states that ‘poets make the best topographers’. This speaks to the long-standing expression of human feelings, understandings, and experiences of landscape through poetry. In this article, I build from this idea of poetry as a way to write about landscapes to explore how poetic inquiry can be a powerful and appropriate method to research landscapes and their heritage. Using examples from my own research practice of the creation of new poems through a process called poetic transcription, I argue that poetic inquiry is an, as-yet, under-used approach within landscape heritage research. Furthermore, poetry’s capacity to express the plural, affective, sensorial, and subjective dimensions of engagement with landscapes and their heritage offers potential within studies informed by phenomenological and more-than-representational perspectives.


Introduction
Stories, metaphors, traces of lives in landscapeswe work with fragments Landscapes and their heritage have long been entangled with poetry.From classic Romantic and topographic poets, such as William Wordsworth and John Clare, to contemporary nature writing (Cooper, 2017), landscapes continue to inspire diverse poetic responses.Similarly, poets have explored cultural heritage and archaeology to write about contemporary issues such as the legacy of colonialism and the climate crisis 1 .Others have drawn inspiration from both landscapes and their heritage.For example, Seamus Heaney wrote several poems referencing peatlands and their archaeology, Ted Hughes' collection Remains of Elmet explores historical and personal associations with the West Yorkshire Pennine hills, and Richard Skelton's collection, Stranger in the mask of a deer, explores the (pre)history of the British Landscape.Poetry has also been used as a participatory tool to explore public understandings of landscapes and cultural heritage.For instance, the UK poet laureate, Simon Armitage worked with young writers on a pamphlet responding to the South Pennines landscape as part of the Stanza Stones Project (Dunn, 2012), and Tarlo and Tucker's (2019, p. 637) work combines visual art, poetry, and walking with workshops and exhibitions to explore 'open, environmentally aware engagements with landscape, place and change' on the Northeast Lincolnshire coast.
In this article, I reflect on how I have incorporated poetry as method within research into perceptions of landscapes and their heritage.My focus is the creation of new poems as a form of poetic inquiry: 'the use of poetry crafted from research endeavours' (Faulkner, 2017, p. 210).I conducted this work within two cross-disciplinary landscape heritage projects.In the first, Wetland Futures in Contested Environments (WetFutures) (http://www.wetfutures.eu/),my role involved qualitative research into perceptions of peatlands and their cultural heritage (Flint & Jennings, 2020, 2022).The second project is ongoing, In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain (IAOF) (https://www.allourfootsteps.uk/), in which my role involves archival and qualitative research to explore the meanings that public rights of way (footpaths, bridleways, and byways) hold for diverse individuals and groups that use them.As someone who already wrote poetry, I was drawn to creating poems as both a research method and a potential way to engage audiences with research findings.Before I share examples, I want to say something about the relationships between landscape, heritage, poetry, and research.

A slippery field: landscape and heritage
Landscape, as a term, is slippery, ambiguous, and contested (Hicks & McAtackney, 2007;Layton & Ucko, 1999;Thomas, 1993).The anthropologist Barbara Bender (2002, p. 106) stated 'landscapes refuse to be disciplined', with research cutting across academic subjects and fields of study.Landscapes have physical, emotional, social, political, symbolic, natural, cultural, temporal, agentic, and many more dimensions.It is outside the scope of this article to summarise this vast literature and debate, however, it is useful to position my perspective within some of this wider scholarship.I understand landscape as relational, emerging through the entanglements and interactions between human and other-than-human elements of the environment (Ingold, 2011;Tilley, 1994), and that these relationships are material and social (Tilley & Cameron-Daum, 2017).Heritage, too, can be thought of as 'not so much a "thing", but as a cultural and social process, which engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present' (Smith, 2006, p. 2).These living heritage practices not only concern relationships between past and present, but shape how landscapes may be experienced and perceived in the future (Harrison et al., 2020).As such landscape and heritage share 'a common intellectual space' and are 'constantly folded into each other', both are framed as emergent concepts in a continuing process of becoming (Harvey, 2015, pp. 911, 921).Through this process people both engage with and are affected by encounters with landscape and heritage; 'we are both in it and of it, we act in relation to it, it acts in us' (Tilley & Cameron-Daum, 2017, p. 7).
Anthropogenic dimensions of landscape heritage are often expressed through the valuing of tangible and intangible aspects of culture, such as: physical structures and traces of human activity; crafts, folklore, and imaginative cultural associations; and, the histories, memories, and meanings that landscapes evoke.Distinctive habitats, flora and fauna, geological formations, and other topographic features, may also be considered to be dimensions of heritage.Landscape heritage, therefore, attends to both physical and less visible dimensions, which may be perceived as both natural and/or cultural.Indeed, many scholars have questioned and problematised binary, and western-centric, separations of cultural and natural dimensions of heritage (Harrison, 2015;Lowenthal, 2005).UK peatlands, for example, are recognised as a 'semi-natural landscape' (Bain et al., 2011) with long histories of human-peatland engagements reflected in archaeological and archival material (Giles, 2020).Landscape infrastructure like paths are often framed as enabling access to nature, but have their own histories of use and development (Hickman & O'Hara, 2022).
My research interests are around how people engage with landscapes (cognitively, physically and affectively), the meanings landscapes hold for diverse individuals and groups, and the role heritage plays in these engagements and meanings over time.Landscapes are 'polyvalent' (Bender, 2002, p. 103)as such, it is difficult to tell a single story of what landscapes mean to people.These plural stories and meanings draw on individual and shared experiences and wider socio-political contexts (Harvey, 2015).Informed by phenomenological perspectives, I am interested in unearthing rich and diverse lived experiences and perceptions of landscape heritage; attending to embodied, affective and multi-sensorial engagements, that help to re-embed people as 'dwelling' within landscapes (Ingold, 2011;Tilley, 1994).I believe that poetic inquiry holds rich potential as a research method into these complex dimensions of landscape heritage.

Connecting research and poetry
Poetic Inquiry is part of broader creative (Kara, 2015;von Benzon, Holton, Wilkinson, & Wilkinson, 2021) and arts-based (Leavy, 2020) research methods.Faulkner (2017, p. 210) describes poetry 'in/as/for inquiry', as 'both a method and product of research activity' that can be integrated throughout the research process.It involves the crafting of research poems across all stages of researchfrom scoping and design, through data collection and analysis, to research dissemination and engagementand has been employed across diverse disciplines including education (Corley, 2020;Martens, 2018), physical education (Berg Svendby, 2016), marketing (Canniford, 2012), health and social care (Carr, 2003;Carroll, Dew, & Howden-Chapman, 2011), anthropology (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010), geography (Coen, Tillmann, Ergler, McGuire, & Gilliland, 2018, Cresswell, 2014), and science communication (Illingworth, 2022).As an analytical method, research poems do more than (re)present or communicate research findings, they are part of condensing, crystalising and interpreting research insights (Babcock, 2017;Eshun & Madge, 2021;Kara, 2015) and contribute to research rigour and researcher reflexivity (Faulkner, 2020).This connects with the idea that writing itself is a method of inquiry: 'writing is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a seductive and tangled method of discovery' (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 967).If we think of writing as method, then it matters what form that writing takesdifferent forms of writing enable and constrain different routes into interpretation and analysis.Writing research poetry is recognised as a meaning-making process and an effective form for working with ambiguity, complexity, and affective experiences (Faulkner, 2020;Kara, 2015;Prendergast, 2009).

Integrating poetic inquiry within landscape heritage research: examples from practice
While much has been written about the connections between previously published poetry and cultural understandings or perceptions of landscapes and their heritage (e.g.Cooper, 2017;Denman-Cleaver & Vrieling van Tuijl, 2018;Edwards, 2017;Everett & Gearey, 2019;Finn, 2003;Kruczkowska, 2016), there is rather less on the creation of poems as a landscape heritage research method (Kavanagh, 2020).
In the following section, I outline examples of how I have incorporated poetic inquiry as method before going on to reflect on what I feel this offers and how it may align with particular approaches to landscape heritage research.To do this I will draw on one specific method within poetic inquiry: poetic transcription.

Analysis of diverse landscape heritage data sources through poetic transcription
Poetic transcription is a method for creating 'found' poems from research texts, in which extracts from existing texts are re-ordered, and re-structured to create poems.These poetic transcriptions can work with diverse research texts such as, interview transcripts, researcher's fieldnotes and diaries, published literature, archival material, or a combination of these (Byrne, 2017).Because of the way researchers engage with texts through poetic transcription, it is simultaneously a process of analysis, interpretation, and representation (Byrne, 2017;Patrick, 2016).It is both a research method and, potentially, a form through which to share that research.Whether or not the poem draws on plural texts, it always reflects plural voices: those of the researcher and the sources used in dialogue.This is not a neutral process.In the examples below, I was acutely aware of my role in curating extracts from research texts through the choices I made to include or exclude certain sentences and the way I arranged them on the page.This issue is not unique to poetic transcription.The selection of text to code in thematic analysis or quotations to include in publications also reflects that researcher/text dialogue: 'like coding, poetic constructions capture the essence and essentials of data in a creative evocative way' (Saldaña, 2011, p. 128).However, poetic transcription brings these choices to the fore, making what are often tacit researcher decisions more visible, and in doing so encourages reflexivity and ethical practices (Richardson, 2001).

Poetic transcription of 'found' landscape texts
One of the material aspects of public rights of way in England are signs and waymarks.Some of these are formal and officialfor example marking where a public footpath leaves a road (Natural England, 2008)others are informal and unofficial (perhaps placed by landowners or other path-users).The text on these signs, the messages they convey and how they convey them, are part of the experience of being on paths and contribute to how people feel in relation to landscapes.They are also tangible aspects of living landscape heritage (Figure 1).
Walking different paths, I photographed signs I came across and began to see these as situated research texts, embedded in the landscape.Back at my desk, I transcribed words from these signs and used them to create a suite of poems.In one, I explored signs that gave instructions to pathusers; grouping them and working with line-endingsrunning the text from one sign into another  Poetry provided a way to explore the cumulative phenomenological aspects of signage, the affective and experiential impact of what are often seen as simply functional path paraphernalia.The process emphasised that signs are not neutral; their appearance and content imply expectations of acceptable behaviour and ways of being in the landscape and may reify traditional power dynamics between landowner/manager and those using paths.This links to wider themes around issues of power, access, and inclusivity; the right to roam is also the right to feel welcome (Sethi, 2021).

Analysing interview data on perceptions of peatlands
The qualitative research for WetFutures included online interviews conducted over video calls with people who lived near the upland peatland of Ilkley Moor (West Yorkshire).These interviews were recorded, transcribed, then coded and analysed thematically.Initially, I created poetic transcriptions from interview transcripts as a way of re-presenting participant voices for dissemination and engagement activities.
I re-read each transcript to identify the dominant themes for that person, highlighting key words and phrases; especially where participants expressed themes in evocative ways, their use of metaphor and simile, language that had a rhythm and music, in their own distinctive voice.
I moved these cut fragments around to create initial drafts (Figure 2) and continued the iterative process of crafting the poems.See below and Figure 3 for examples of these poetic transcriptions.You get that feeling You're not talking about a Cairngorm you could walk across it in a day but you get that feeling, you know?That illusion of wildness of looking down on the world that you can conquer something.
Living and being in an upland atmosphere there's a quality to the air.You feel very connected with the landscape.Every day it is different see the heather and smell the air see how the weather rolls in from the west.
To live in a landscape that's been valued it's the same as stepping into a building that people have used and valued over the years.You get that feeling this is a special place for us we're part of keeping it important.
Although I initially planned to use the poetic transcriptions within research engagement, once I began the process I realised its potential within the analysis.Whilst the chunking and tagging of data through coding tends to move from the specifics of individual cases to explore commonalities and dissonances, creating poetic transcriptions provided a structured way of returning to the data to sense-check themes.It allowed me to reinstate individuals' lived experiences of physical, cognitive, and affective engagement with this landscape and its heritage within the analysis, and resulted in a series of interconnected poems that explored complex and plural perceptions of peatlands.

Analysing sensory details from multiple archival sources 2
Within the IAOF project, I undertook archival research into a medium-distance walking route in northern England called The Cown Edge Way.I employed poetic transcription as a method to bring multiple archival sources (guidebooks, newspaper articles, and transcripts of radio broadcasts) into conversation with one another in my analysis, with a focus on the multi-sensory and affective dimensions of paths.An extract from this analysis-in-progress is included below.As the Cown Edge Way is a walking route, sources tend to describe different physical ways of engaging with the path (climbing, dropping, turning, crossing etc.).Initially I grouped these with the haptic sense, but close attention to language, tense, and repetitions (prompted by the poetic transcription process) emphasised the active nature of these tactile relations.This led to explorations of movement as a potential sense in its own right in my analysis (Smith, 2020).Poetic techniques, such as the deliberate placing of line breaks and the positioning of words within lines, allowed me to focus on these repeated, cumulative mobile engagements.

Reflections on poetic inquiry and landscape heritage research
The three examples above illustrate how I have integrated poetic transcription as a method within my own research.As well as strengths associated with poetic ways of working with texts for instance, close attention to language, syntax, imagery and voice within analysis, and iterative cycles of revision that encourage time-on-task (Oliver, 1994) -I feel that poetic inquiry has specific qualities that offer potential within landscape heritage research.

Attending to affective, multi-sensory and embodied experience
The research undertaken for both projects discussed in this article focused on the meanings that landscapes, their heritage (tangible and intangible) and components (e.g.signs and paths) hold for people.Those meanings are entangled with place attachment: 'emotional bonds which people develop with various places' (Lewicka, 2011, p. 219).People's perceptions of and engagements with landscapes are inextricably linked to how they feel about them.As Prendergast (2009, p. 546) highlights, 'the best poetic inquiry-again, as seen in poetry-will carry within it the power to move its audience affectively as well as intellectually and will deal with the kinds of topics that lead into the affective experiential domain'.One of the oft-repeated mantras of creative writing is 'show, don't tell' (Sansom, 1994), indicating that the way a poem is written contributes to how poems are felt as well as understood.As such, writing poetry can focus researcher attention on the affective dimensions of human engagements and attachments with landscape heritage.In the poetic transcriptions You get that feeling and Footsteps (Figure 3), I aimed to evoke the sense of escape, connection and history that made this peatland meaningful for research participants.Similarly, To all walkers evokes the experience of being on paths through the cumulative affective impact of signage.Harriet Tarlo has used a form of poetic transcription she calls documentary poems in this way, using text from interviews to 'unearth, affective and effective understanding and value of place' (Tarlo & Tucker, 2019, p. 657).
Poetic transcription can be an ethical and enlivening way of foregrounding the voices of data sources in analysis (Faulkner, 2020).For example, within WetFutures I synthesised themes, issues, and tensions drawn from analysis of interview transcripts, online questionnaire responses, user-generated online reviews, newspaper coverage, and academic literature.However, I was conscious that the memories and meanings people associated with peatlands were highly individualrooted in their own life histories, identities, and engagements with the landscapeand that this might be lost in overview synthesis.Poetic transcription provided a means to centre participants' individual voices and stories, in their own words and rhythms of speech, in both analysis and dissemination.
Poetry may also be a powerful and resonant method within sensory-focused studies (Paiva, 2020), as it can 'enfold the reader with an intense and embodied, sensorial engagement with its subject' (Giles, 2000, p. 63).I found that using poetic transcription as an analytical method, with close attention to sensory details, across archival material for the Cown Edge Way, drew attention to gaps relating to specific senses.Overall, these sources frame the route in terms of visual experiences (what can be seen along the way and the opportunities for far-reaching views) and bodily movement, with scant references to sound, smell, or taste.These insights have fed into future research plans to create auto-ethnographic (researcher-voiced) poems informed by walking the route, attending to, and recording information about, less-represented sensory details.
Through poetry's focus on the affective and embodied, it can also be a way of (re)embedding people within landscape heritage research: 'a poem without human occupancy is rare' (Hirshfield, 1997, p. 140).For me, this draws a connection between Ingold's (2000) description of attending to the environment as a way of dwelling, or being-in-the-world, and the poet Carl Leggo's description (as cited in Prendergast, 2009) of poetry itself as a way of being-in-the-world.

Embracing the plural and fragmentary
Landscapes are multi-temporal with plural timescales: from the geological and archaeological to the lifetime (memory), seasonal, and daily (Bender, 2001(Bender, , 2002)).The way this temporality is experienced in the landscape is not linear, it collapses and erupts in ways that bring past, present, and future into conversation with one another (Harvey, 2015).As such, landscapes can be fragmentary and contradictory (Bender, 1993).Fredengren (2016) has noted, in the context of archaeology, that these present-day encounters with fragments from the deep past can evoke wonder and a sense of (re)enchantment with the world.Poetry is well placed to explore and bridge these connections as, like archaeology, it can engage with the uncertain, imaginative, and speculative nature of reconstruction from fragmentary evidence, bringing the past into the present in vital ways (Finn, 2003).The poetic transcription in Figure 3 evokes a sense of connection across deep time in people's perceptions of peatlands and their heritage.
Although I have described some of the distinct dimensions of landscape heritage that I feel poetry may be a useful research method to explore (e.g. the sensorial and affective), I feel one of the strengths of poetic inquiry is that it resists deconstructing people's perceptions of landscape heritage into neat (yet unrealistic) components.Poetic inquiry can tease apart but also reassemble and appreciate holistic, messy, and enlivened perspectives that make landscape heritage such an engaging field of study.As an analytical method, poetic transcription allowed me to sit with emergent plurality and ambiguity across data sources, holding a space between the creative and the critical (Faulkner, 2020).Like landscape heritage perhaps, poems can resist a single narrative or interpretation (Bell & Commane, 2018;Sansom, 1994).In addition, poetry is not fixed in the language of a single discipline (Canniford, 2012), thus has potential to speak across and beyond the many disciplines engaged in landscape heritage research, creating opportunities for new meanings and interpretations to be drawn.
Phenomenological and more-than-representational perspectives Wylie (2018, p. 219) notes that there is a sense within 'phenomenological thinking that deeper truths about humanity and nature are perhaps best accessed and expressed via artistic mediumsthrough art, poetry, music'.Poetic inquiry and other creative/arts-based methods can be potential tools within the 'methodological experimentation' and 'additional approaches' (Waterton, 2018, p. 98) which aim to give voice to the affective and embodied aspects of more-than-representational perspectives: 'an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds'.(Lorimer, 2005, p. 83;MacPherson, 2010;von Benzon et al., 2021).The nature of poetry as a form that engages with these affective and multi-sensory experiences, may lend particular strengths to studies informed by relational, phenomenological, and morethan-representational perspectives.
Just as poetic inquiry has power to foreground the perspectives of those in marginalised positions 'that may be partially or totally silenced with an academic gaze' in social research (Faulkner, 2020, p. 64), it provides opportunities to explore landscape heritage perspectives that may not otherwise surface.For example, poetic transcription of archival material relating to the Cown Edge Way, enabled me to see how the language in these sources focused not just on the physical characteristics of the path and the movement of people, but how the path and pedestrian both move in relation to one-another and the wider terrain.This presented a way to write about the other-thanhumanthe path itselfwhich recognises, similar to Vannini's (2015, p. 320) observation about Saville's work on parkour practitioners, that people 'move withnot on or through, but "with"' the materialities of other-than-human aspects of the environment.Archival sources describe the path as having agency: it climbs, turns, and drops with the people who use it, and even 'leads' people.Poetic techniques, drawing from open form poetrya fluid form that works creatively with the use of space on the page through the positioning of line-breaks and blank space (Tarlo, 2011)allowed me to bring elements of this movement and dynamic landscape-human relations to the page.

Possibilities and challenges
In examples from practice, I have focused specifically on poetic transcription.This is just one form of poetic inquiry, creating what Prendergast (2009) calls literature and participant voiced poems.I chose these examples as I believe they offer an accessible way into thinking about poetry as a research method and reflect my current work with poetic inquiry.However, there are many other ways poetry can be integrated as method.For instance, poetry can be part of the research journaling process, distilling fieldnotes into poetic structures or as an autoethnographic approach to capture researcher insights, what Zani (2019) describes as 'fieldpoems' (Saldaña, 2011;Slotnick & Janesick, 2011).As part of my research journaling, I write a short poem each day using the Japanese haiku form.I use this as a creative way to crystallise research insights in progress, and as part of my reflexivity.Two of these haiku bookend this article.
As poetic inquiry is both a research method and produces 'outputs' in the form of poems, it opens up new opportunities for research dissemination and engagement.There is increasing interest in diverse creative approaches to engagement, which include creative writing (Phillips & Kara, 2021;Wilkinson et al., 2021) and poetry (e.g.Tarlo & Tucker, 2019, Croucher, Dayes, Giles, & Holland, 2019).Whilst poetry can be included in traditional academic publications (Richardson, 2001) it also invites us to trouble the traditionally assumed role that prose plays in research outputs (Patrick, 2016), which may create new spaces for sharing landscape heritage research.For instance, the University of Manchester's Stories of Discovery project, which explored the legacy of the antiquarian Thomas Bateman in the Peak District, produced an anthology of poems and artwork (Giles, 2022), some of which were included in an exhibition at Sheffield's Weston Park Museum.I have created a series of 'postcards' to share selected poetic transcriptions from the WetFutures research (e.g. Figure 3).Pairing each poem with a photograph provided by participants or the WetFutures team, enabled the combination of cognitive and affective aspects of peatland heritage (through the text) with the visual and physical aspects (through the image).These are part of creative approaches to engaging others with research which potentially cross disciplinary boundaries and expand reach (Wilkinson et al., 2021).As Glesne (1997, p. 216) puts it, poetry 'opens up a spirit of discovery and creation in the researcher, and in the reader, who may begin to think about the process and product of research in very different ways'.
Like any research method, the integration of poetic inquiry should be aligned with the research aims and may require additional learning and development.Writing poetry can be a 'risky business' for researchers (Cahnmann, 2003, p. 30), sometimes perceived as unscientific or lacking in rigour, even though poetic techniques (such as the use of metaphor and simile) are common tools in academic writing (Sword, 2017).There is a substantial literature on poetic inquiry as method that researchers may draw on to provide a scholarly underpinning for its use.Like other research methods and forms of creative writing, poetry requires researchers to invest time and effort in honing their skills and craft (Cresswell, 2014) through, for instance, reading the work of other poets (and poetresearchers) and taking courses and workshops to learn poetic techniques (Prendergast, 2009).
There can also be perceived tensions around the 'fit' of integrating creative methods within traditional research paradigms.However, rather than placing creative and more traditional methods in opposition, I feel they are more productively framed as enabling different lens or perspectives on the research.Poetry has been described as offering 'a different way of knowing' (Hirshfield, 1997, preface) or a form of attendance upon experience (Berger, 1984, as cited in Giles, 2000).In this way, poetic inquiry prompts different ways of attending to landscape heritage, that may provide unanticipated insights (Faulkner, 2020).This may be integrated alongside more traditional research methods within a methodological and interpretative bricolage: the emergent and contextual 'puzzling out' using different 'tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation' to work between and across plural perspectives (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, pp. 4-5).

Conclusions
My aim, in this article, is not to suggest that all landscape heritage researchers should take up writing poetry, rather that poetic inquiry is a valuable tool in the methods box that those with an interest in creative approaches may wish to explore.
Poetry can attend to emotional, intellectual, embodied, and temporal dimensions of landscape heritage, not as separate themes but as part of a holistic framing.As Babcock (2017) puts it 'Poetry allows researchers a special language that captures experience in a way that other genres cannot'.It speaks to how landscape heritage makes one feelallowing researchers and audiences to connect with research emotionally as well as intellectually.I believe that poetry's capacity to attend to multi-sensory and other-than-human facets of experience offers particular potential within research informed by phenomenological and more-than-representational perspectives.
Poetic inquiry is currently an underexplored method in landscape heritage research and, when used within a 'bricolage' approach, may be integrated alongside other forms of inquiry (e.g.archival research, qualitative research, fieldwork) and public engagement to facilitate deeper understandings of landscapes and their heritage.As a potentially inter-disciplinary research method, it may also facilitate 'a more collaborative conversation between the realms of heritage and landscape studies' (Harvey, 2015, p. 913).
In the three examples within this article, I have shared and reflected on how I constructed 'found' poems as part of my analysis of research texts.This is very much work in progress and I continue to develop and explore the intersections between both the poetic and analytical aspects of my practice.However, I have found poetic transcription to be a powerful meaning-making process, which enabled me to explore sensorial, affective and plural perceptions of landscape heritage, to unearth and emphasise themes across diverse data sources, and to notice silences.A poem's power to honour voice and silence data's story.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Examples of formal (left) and informal (right) signage found on paths and trails.Source: author.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Footsteps, an example of a poetic transcription postcard created for WetFutures.Source: author, photograph provided by research participant.
glen, to a dell, to the Goyt to Charlesworth Recreation Ground LANDSCAPE RESEARCHto emphasise shifts in tone.The resulting poem, To all walkers, explores how signs often focus on what is prohibited and restricted in the landscape, rather than what is permitted and encouraged.