Scepticism about the value of parochialism and local belonging has been a persistent feature of geographical scholarship, which has advocated a relational account of place and a cosmopolitan worldview. This paper revisits the Parish Maps project that was instigated in 1987 by UK arts and environment charity Common Ground, which led to the creation of thousands of maps across the UK and beyond, and was appraised in 1996 by Crouch and Matless in this journal. Drawing on archival materials and in‐depth interviews, we examine the legacy of the project. We argue that Common Ground's vision for Parish Maps represents a “positive parochialism” that confidently asserts the validity of the parish without retreating towards insularity. We complicate this by revealing diverse ways that communities took up Common Ground's vision. We conclude by arguing that the view of parochialism manifest by Parish Maps offers a foundation for ecological concern that remains relevant today, with places offering the potential for solidarities that bring together local and incomer. This “positive parochialism” disturbs assumptions that local attachments are necessarily exclusive and indicates the unresolved challenge of finding ways to realise the value of affect and creative environmental engagement in wider policy and land‐use planning.

In 2013, Matthew Kirschenbaum advocated for increased collaboration between digital archivists and digital humanities specialists to make the most out of borndigital archives. Since then, researchers and archivists have experimented with innovative interfaces for access to writer's archives that emerge from individual research cultures and practices. Simultaneously, archives such as the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia are beginning to collect the work of authors who work in inventive digital ways. This article will therefore explore the following question: how might archivists, authors, and researchers profitably collaborate to explore the nature of creativity in the borndigital archive, so that both digital preservation and digital scholarship take place? In doing so, we look to the complementary fields of genetic criticism and digital humanities to inform the development of archival tools as 'hermeneutical instruments.' We will explore how such instruments might allow us to read horizontally across archival strata, building on an 'esthetic of the possible' to develop a 'jouer avec les fonds,' supported through collaboration between researchers, archivists and writers. Finally, we consider how this approach challenges archival practices, and propose forms of collaboration that might address both archival practice and emerging forms of scholarship.

We report preliminary results of a series of experiments designed to explore the importance of interspecific competition within arable weed communities at different scales. Competition hierarchies were apparent from a pot experiment with different levels of nutrients and water. Two field experiments looked at Bromus sterilis, Galium aparine and Papaver rhoeas in winter wheat in the field, in a range of combinations and management treatments, and a fourth field experiment included a wider variety of species. There was little effect of fertilizer on population behaviour in the the field. Bromus increased around ten fold per year on minimum‐tilled plots, regardless of other treatments. Galium increased on organically‐fertilized and minimum‐tilled plots, but only in the absence of Bromus. Papaver densities remained low, but again were depressed in the presence of high densities of Bromus. Taken together, the experiments demonstrate the existence of competition between weed species. However, as the design of the experiment increased to include greater levels of environmental variation, so competition became more difficult to detect, and less useful for interpreting the results than knowledge of the biology of the individual species. At the scale of interest to the farmer, the level of competition is not a good predictor for weed population dynamics.

This paper proposes a reconsideration of ‘The New Nature Writing’ as an archipelagic literature, a literature concerned with the diverse and distinctive cultures of Britain and Ireland as much as with its nature. It interrogates the term ‘nature writing’ as applied to this recent literary movement and outlines some differences between this and ‘place writing’. It also traces the influence of archipelagic criticism on this recent movement, exploring some common ground between devolutionary and environmental politics. Finally, it proposes that the archipelagic perspective offers a potentially quite useful means of thinking through some recent debates around the status of place in a modern, global environment

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of landscape writing in Britain and Ireland, often referred to as ‘The New Nature Writing’. Rooted in the work of an older generation of environment–focused authors and activists, this new form is both stylistically innovative and mindful of ecology and conservation practice. The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place connects these two generations to show that the contemporary energy around the cultures of landscape and place is the outcome of a long–standing relationship between environmentalism and the arts. Drawing on original interviews with authors, archival research, and scholarly work in the fields of literary geographies, ecocriticism and archipelagic criticism, the book covers the work of such writers as Robert Macfarlane, Richard Mabey, Tim Robinson and Alice Oswald. Examining the ways in which these authors have engaged with a wide range of different environments, from the edgelands to island spaces, Jos Smith reveals how they recreate a resourceful and dynamic sense of localism in rebellion against the homogenizing growth of ‘clone town Britain’.