Extractive Geographies, Immersive Lives: Performative Explorations of Labour and Materialities in the Southern Peak District

This chapter focuses on three common practices of the rural landscape, quarrying, milking, and walling, exploring its material and human entanglements to understand the 'alternate tellings' that go beyond the rural idyll commonly portrayed through art as well as through the preservation policies and practises of local councils and heritage agencies. It shows how stone can be transformed from a block in the earth to fertiliser for fields, to be fed to cows that are manipulated for their milk, that is used to drink and make foodstuffs, a constant connection made across the landscape. The landscape is an assemblage, a social entity growing and changing, heterogeneous pieces each, a composite to act upon it. Yet, these constant movements find their stable entities, performed in the everyday practices that create routine and stabilise the landscape assemblage.