Three Steps Towards a Rural Utopia:
Negotiating “Urban Despair” in Peter Riley’s Alstonefield
Sam Kemp
Grimspound, Dartmoor
'…The principle
is very clear. To construct a space in which
worth is realisable and whatever anyone is bears
its meaning forward so that the time lived, always
at an end is returned across hope. This is simple,
is virtue, is the act of the unacknowledged giver.'
I have just moved down to South Devon and rediscovered walking. I can leave my flat in Plymouth, weighed down with maps, bus timetables and pasta, and within an hour be looking down on a village hidden in the depths of a coastal valley. This is the England from railway posters, the bright fields, church steeples, and country houses; localism, self-governance, and the tail end of the arcadian dream. This is where we retreat into the past for inspiration for the future.
As I’m climbing over stiles or peeking into ruins or sliding down a muddy field, I’m plotting my own escape. A smallholding with a sea view. A free economy with travelers from all over the world. People doing as much or as little as they wanted, coming together for long and lazy evenings as the sun goes down.
This kind of setup is nothing new. The countryside is full of people trying to skirt around capitalism, an effort that usually goes hand in hand with the values of environmentalism. At its extreme, there’s an ancient nostalgia for the golden age of easy living, but also a radicalism for a fair society, culminating in a kind of progressive nostalgia. The reality of the dream is not important. What’s important are the contradictions and tensions that a rural utopia is inherently riddled with—in short—the challenge that it presents.
Alstonefield by Peter Riley is a poetry sequence that keeps these tensions balanced, the main one being between the urban and the rural, and what they represent. Our perceptions of each are well established. The city is a place of culture, progress and danger, and the country is full of tranquility, romanticism and backwardness. Literature has upheld, challenged, and altered these perceptions for centuries, and Alstonefieldis the story of Riley’s negotiation of these tropes via a questioning of rural utopia. At the same time, this is far from an academic exercise. This is a personal quest in accepting mortality, questioning modernity, and giving yourself over to the landscape.
Woodland nr. Burrator, Dartmoor
Utopia is a performance. Dance with it.
Alstonfieldis made up for five parts, each of them a walk made around the village in the title. These walks increasingly reach feverish points of mysticism, culminating in apparitions and ghostly conversations. There’s a dance with a giant rabbit, a cup of cocoa with Mr Mole, and a sausage in a disappearing cafe. At these points, the poem is bursting with energy, propelled forward with a psychogeographer’s desire for the essence of place and people.
For Riley, the rural is bound up with its opposite—the urban—notably Cambridge. This is the world of profit margins, cold hard capitalism,and the promise of impossible answers. Here, in Alstonefield, an ecocentric alternative performs for and with him, advocating dance in the face of the city’s Moloch (here a Sphinx wants to ‘…draft us all into bigger/ and bigger drainage units.’
A particular oval meadow is the scene for many idyllic encounters of community life and a Hardy-esque rural solidarity. This is where maidens ‘dance on the darkening green to the end of day’, and the light is a ‘self-supporting, concentric economy’. The meadow is a Piazza del Popolo, the square in front of a ‘kind of medieval Italian town hall, signifying self-government, republicanism and democracy.’ In the meadow, Riley has stumbled into a mini state, operating independently of the urban. This is as close to a rural utopia as we’re going to get, and it’s full of light, joy and playfulness.
‘…we dance on, the band
shows no sign of fatigue, the floor
is hidden under five foot of fog and me and
my furry friend we flourish at death’s door.’
-P. 38
Here, to dance is to turn your back on everything that the urban offers: knowledge, purpose, ticketed excitement. The rural dance stands for nothing. It’s a spontaneous and continuous performance of freedom that sweeps the poet up at every turn. It represents the wider ecological cycles of the countryside. Forgetting the signs of modernity, the fact that this is an ‘upland pastoral community run by machines’ there’s times in Alstonefieldwhere we enter a pre-feudal, pre-agrarian-capitalist world, a system slipped out of human contact, starting and ending with the landscape. This is where ‘the fox dances/ with the hare and the lamb adores its tomb’. In short, this utopia performs in the face of its own impossibility:
The land curves round us in this
abondandoned place where people have always
been content to be deprived, turning and
smiling in the face of profit, dancing
the night away…
This utopia is a performance because it cannot be anything else. It exists in the poet’s mind and manifests itself in the fields and valleys of Alstonefield. It’s lurking somewhere between the various layers that make up the poem; the mystical landscape, pastoral hopes and political sketches. It’s never an actual utopia, but it’s as real as the rest of the poem.
Deep time and accepting mortality
Death’s welcome is a ‘history’ in this poem, meaning that to walk among the bare layers of limestone and valleys of the Peak district (home to Alstonefield), is to be reminded of deep time at every turn. The shifts and processes that formed the landscape are made up of huge time frames, a million years here, 100 million there. This topography displays the vastness of cosmic time, juxtaposed against the fragility of urban structures:
…The towns over the hills
are full of ills and answers but the works die
and crumble, the chimney stands at the valley head
derelict, a tower to lost patience. Not this valley
which has never suffered profit…
P. 34
The stone building blocks of landscape are as good as permanent. Forever shifting, but finite; shaping the land and reshuffling into one another ever since the Big Bang. What effect does this have on the local walker? For Riley it builds up into stunning imagery of reverence for the landscape; a natural beauty that carries with it all of birth and creation — and subsequently death. The walk uncovers the relentlessness of natural processes and their
The Rame Peninsula, Cornwall
awesome effect. It’s not nature worship, more of a poetical geology. Riley describes looking down at the head of a valley in his final nighttime ramble:
​
dazzling brightness a full moon riding
the crystal scattered sky and the great V
tunnelled before me gleaming, cold, empty,
shining into itself against the black, deep
star-clear firmament, this whole earth-mass
holding the celestial fact in its arms.
P. 29.
Riley approaches death in a stoical manner. Throughout Alstonefield these endless cycles of the earth are caught up with the Gods and Goddesses of the fields. For Riley, these entities seem like a given in this landscape. There’s God fields and Godly insects. They ‘walk in the dark fields.’ They’re more like ghosts of Gods, still hanging on in the depths of the countryside. Ancient beings as much a part of the place as the soil. They’re a kind of shorthand for the mysticism of land. They might be the land itself.
In any case they will outlive the walker. There’s no grand narrative here. The poet is not making a grab for eternity in his writing. Nobody is stronger than death. There’s a humility in Riley’s journey around Alstonefield, another circuit in the endless circuits of nature, with time enough to ‘watch the Godly insects making laws.’
Doubt/multiplicity
​
Alstonefield mystifies the landscape but falls just short of romanticising it. There’s plenty of descriptions of a rose-tinted pastoral life, but we’re well aware that the poet brings his own hopes and fantasies into the landscape (a dance with a giant rabbit, for example). The land only brings half of itself to the table, and Riley’s imagination fills in the gaps. This is an imagination recovering from the ‘deriliction’ of the city.
This leaves plenty of room for doubt, and Riley straddles the boundary between nostalgia and reality. He makes it clear from the beginning that his interest is not in the village itself, writing in a letter to the poet Tony Baker that he’s ‘making sure it’s still there — ‘it’ not exactly being Alstonefield but the challenge and serenity it conveys’ (Preface, P. 3). Throughout Alstonefield there’s a questioning of nostalgia. Onthe one hand, the village is described as…
…a repair depot that continues through governments
and wars at the end of a small back road where
carefree labourers stroll around dark and competent
P. 11
This rural image is straight out of a Constable painting. It’s the England that is prized and sold by the heritage industry throughout the country. In parts, Alstonefield fits in to those picture postcard images, but Riley is quick to balance everything out. This isn’t an untouched piece of old countryside—‘Modernity’s favourite message’ is everywhere (‘no parking. Move on, keep going. No hermitage here…’). And from his own experience, Riley concludes that there’s nowhere in the Peak District where you’re free from the sound of a car.
This is the ‘challenge’ of the rural. The draw of serenity that makes us want to escape ‘urban despair’, but also its reality. Riley’s poem snakes along this boundary and the writing is upfront in its aims. It’s one walker’s conversation with the landscape; mystical, political, and questioning. It’s not the well trodden condemnation of mass agriculture or easy swipes at a faceless system. In the frequent discussions on capitalism, for example, the poet is more questioning than condemning (‘…I don’t blame you/ for running love against profit’). In short, Alstonefieldis not trying to persuade us of rural virtue. In a sobering punch to rural romanticism, Riley states that
It would be specious to pretend
that any bit of British countryside is anything
but an agricultural factory marked piss off.
-P. 23
It’s these multiplicities of place that have made Alstonefieldsuch a revered landscape poem. The reader is confronted with multiple interpretations of the rural, woven into a complex sense of place. This is not the pristine England from tourism marketing campaigns, but nor is it anuneducated, poverty stricken countryside (of Ronald Blythe’s Ackenfield). Alstonefield is everything in-between. It’s full of hope and despair, earthy realism and fantastic imagery. Scattered across this spectrum are the everyday glimpses of utopia that the countryside offers, and the contradictions that challenge it.
Livermead, South Devon