Mapping Elmet: Demythologising Ted Hughes’s ‘Elmet’ in the Upper Calder Valley draws on close readings of Hughes’s writings, archival research, field walking and research in the landscapes and places associated with Hughes in the Upper Calder Valley, mapping of the settings of Elmet based poems using archives and GIS mapping, and insights collected from psychogeography and hauntology to create new interpretations of Hughes’s writings and aspects of his biography, and to challenge the assumed knowledge and myths that have developed around his relationship with the Upper Calder Valley. Elmet is the name Hughes applied to a rough circle of land between Halifax, Keighley, Colne and Littleborough on the Yorkshire/Lancashire Pennine watershed centered on Heptonstall. In this thesis I focus on the central area of that wider landscape, the areas around Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall. These are the places most closely associated with Hughes and are the focus of a large majority of his Elmet based poems. Mapping Elmet will reveal the complexity of Hughes’s literary relationship with his natal landscape. GIS mapping and close readings of his Elmet poems reveals clusterings of poems that emerge as an ‘autobiographical centre’ in Mytholmroyd and a ‘mythic’ centre around Heptonstall, with the poems clustered in each area having distinctive styles, characteristics and tone. The thesis will also discuss a number of other psychogeographical binaries - moor/valley, light/dark, life/death, that Hughes deploys to articulate his vision of the area, before concluding with an account of how psychogeographically-influenced fieldwalking in the landscape and insights culled from hauntology have enabled new interpretations of Hughes’s writings, provided an expanded context for the work, and challenged assumed knowledge about the poet and his work.
| Date of Award | 30 Jul 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Stephen Ely (Main Supervisor) |
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