And so I give you this land, the way you'd hold open a door or offer someone else your hand. I give you this land for play, which means I give you time itself, the close-kept summer days. (Helen Mort, from 'I Give You This Land', 2015, p. 11) Introduction: A Literary Lacuna Margaret Drabble's work of populist literary geography, A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature, contains two maps, drawn by Ian Thomson, which highlight key literary locations in England, Scotland and Wales (Drabble, 1979). In the first of the maps, focusing on Wales and much of England, an inset provides the granular detail required to represent some of the multi-layered literary associations of metropolitan London; and, saliently, a second inset map is deemed necessary, overleaf, to geo-locate the literature of the Lake District on the map of northern England and Scotland. In Thomson's mapping of Drabble's vision of literary Britain, then, urban London and the rural Lakes are presented as sites of textual thickness. By comparison, the map of the literary Peak District is strikingly thin. This predominantly rural landscape-encircled by the major industrialised conurbations of Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and Stoke-on-Trent-is represented by just three locations: the stately home of Chatsworth; the tourist town of Matlock; and the village of Cromford, home of Richard Arkwright's pioneering cotton mill. Moreover, in contrast to the nearby Potteries and Sherwood Forest, the landscape of the Peak District is not even labelled on Thomson's literary map. It seems symbolically apposite, then, that this innominate, in-between territory is cartographically split in two as the map showing Wales and the southern part of England is spread across two pages in Drabble's book. That is to say, the mapping of the Peak District is fragmented, in A Writer's Britain, by the presence of both cartographic borders and the white space of the gutter margin. On Thomson's literary map of Britain, this landscape of geographical centrality is placed on both the cartographic and cultural margins.
