Landscape,Imagination and Experience: Processes of Emplacement among the British in Rural France

Introduction

This paper argues that in order to understand the relationships my respondents, British lifestyle migrants living in rural France, have to their new physical surroundings, it is necessary to account for the process by which they come to develop a deeper understanding of their new environment. As the ethnography presented in this paper demonstrates, this is a process characterized by complex negotiations between imagination and lived experience. I argue here that it is necessary not only to account for the role of the migrants' direct engagements with the landscape, but also to recognize the continued role played by their idealized preconceptions of rural living and explore how these intersect with their understandings and interpretations of life within the destination.

Previous research on the British in rural France has demonstrated the extent to which culturally-specific imaginings of landscape and location are central to the decision to migrate. The seminal work in this field by Buller and Hoggart (1994a) argued that, in the absence of available housing in the British countryside, the French countryside has come to represent the rural idyll, a British middle class idealization, influencing both decisions to migrate and property selection. This is an argument that has remained unquestioned within the literature, reinforced and confirmed by subsequent research including my own (see for example Barou and Prado, 1995; Gervaise-Aguer, 2004, 2006; Benson, 2011).

This paper supplements Buller and Hoggart's argument by exploring the role that such imaginings play in life following migration, particularly in the migrants' emerging relationships with the landscape. It builds on the idea that the landscape is in continual process (see for example Bender, 1998), presenting the migrants' relationships to their new surroundings as also in process, subject to change as they gain increasing knowledge and experience of their surroundings. Furthermore, it focuses on the complementary and contradictory roles of imagination and experience in developing these relationships. Following authors such as Massey (2006) and Bender (1998) the paper therefore recognizes that both practice and representation are intrinsically intertwined in the construction of the landscape.

The insights into the migrants' relationships with the landscape thus provide a lens through which to understand the process by which they become emplaced in their new surroundings and gradually acquire embodied knowledge of how to live in the Lot. As the ethnography presented here demonstrates, culturally-framed interpretations of the landscape were important to my respondents – they were one way in which the migrants were (post-hoc) able to justify and rationalize the decision to migrate – but these existed alongside and in tension with subjective experiences of their new surroundings, at times confirming, while at other times contradicting preconceived ideals about their new surroundings.

I argue that the migrants' complex relationship with their new surroundings can best be understood through reference to Bourdieu's (1977, 1990) logic of practice; their experiences of and responses to the Lotoise landscape mediated through their bodies. As they worked in their gardens, fields and vineyards, feeling the soil beneath their nails, they repeatedly subjected their bodies to the materiality and physicality of landscape. Such embodied experiences of the landscape subtly changed their relationship to it. In this respect, the process of getting to know the landscape was one through which the embodiment of their knowledge became more visceral, changing my respondents' understandings of their new lives. Nevertheless, such engagements were justified through reference, once again, to rural France as the rural idyll. In this respect, the focus on the migrants' relationships with the landscape reflects the way in which imagination and subjective experience are mediated through the body.

‘Locating’ the research

The research presented in this paper is part of a larger piece of ethnographic research carried out between 2003 and 2005 into the lives of the British living in the Lot, a rural inland department in southwest France. This consisted of extensive participant observation and unstructured interviews with members of the British population living permanently in the Lot. My respondents had moved to the Lot within the last twenty years, and while some had been there for a long time, others had only moved the previous year. While there were many retirees among them, typical of this more lifestyle-oriented migration, they ranged in age upwards from young children, some of whom had been born in France. The timing and context of their migration, both in terms of their arrival in the Lot and their stage in the life course were also diverse (Benson, 2009, 2010). Importantly, the migrants' homes in the Lot were their primary residences, and they stayed there year round, perhaps leaving to visit friends and family back in Britain once or twice a year, or going on holiday.

The Lot is a particularly apt place to explore the relationships of these lifestyle migrants to their surroundings because of the way that it has been represented both as a tourist destination and as a place to live. In particular, the Lot is renowned for its rurality, and the sense of ruggedness that the landscape exudes (Martin, 2008). It offers awesome limestone cliffs as a backdrop to everyday life, medieval French villages, alongside the tranquillity of its natural beauty, and emptiness (it is one of the least populated departments in France).

In the last fifty or sixty years, the Lot has attracted British migrants of all ages. Many of these migrants have been lured by the promise of rurality (a stark opposition to their cynical and fatalistic presentations of life in Britain) that they perceive the French countryside to offer, with initial preconceptions of the landscape encouraging migration and property selection (see also Barou and Prado, 1995; Buller and Hoggart, 1994a & b; Depierre and Guitard, 2006; Gervais-Aguer, 2004, 2006). On one level, this can be understood as a romantic valorization of the countryside. However, only a more sustained examination of post-migration lives can reveal the true extent to which these imaginings shape the migrants' expectations of their lives within the rural idyll. In what follows I therefore reveal how culturally-specific imaginings intersect with everyday practices and understandings of post-migration lives.

Imagining and enacting a better way of life

When I first met many of my respondents in the Lot, I often asked them to recall the initial decision to migrate and explain to me why they had chosen the Lot, or indeed, their individual properties. As they reminisced, the unique scenery had been an important factor in property selection, an aspect of the area that had made a distinct impression on them during their first visits to the Lot. Some of them had visited the Lot on their summer holidays, while others only discovered the department once they started to search for a home in rural France. For most, though, the first experience of the area was remembered in terms of an aesthetic appreciation, even admiration, of the Lotoise landscape, with a particular value placed on the beautiful backdrop.

Their accounts thus reflected the common desire for a scenic view found among lifestyle migrants (King, Warnes, and Williams, 2000; O'Reilly, 2000; Waldren, 1996). Such a scenic backdrop is desirable, as Hirsch (1995) argued, because of the promise of what life might be like, or, as Urry (2002) has argued in the case of the tourist gaze, because of a sense of escape central to the tourist gaze.

Beyond the natural beauty of the Lot, its British residents focussed on how the landscape was emblematic of a better and different way of life, and packaged as the rural idyll (cf Buller and Hoggart, 1994a; Barou and Prado, 1995), with its natural and holistic way of living. This was a way of life that they wanted to be a part of, their actions within their new surroundings providing testament to their efforts in this direction. In this respect, the landscape represented the possibility of a distinct break from their lives before migration, a space where they would have opportunities to live their lives the way they felt they wanted. The ethnography presented below demonstrates that over time, and through their embodied experiences of the landscape, they develop a relationship with their surroundings that is as much influenced by their own experiences of life in the Lot as it is by wider collective imaginings.

As my ethnographic enquiries reveal, by repeatedly evoking images of the rural idyll, my respondents stress their own search for social harmony, continuity, stability, and order (cf Selwyn, 1996), aspects of rurality predicated on community (Strathern, 1982; Rapport, 1993). They emphasize their desires for a localized, bounded, ‘traditional rural community’ based on mechanical solidarity (Rapport, 1993: 33) and valuing the ‘immediate family and friendship ties, local community solidarity and supportiveness’ (Perry, 1986: 22). In this respect, they demonstrate the centrality of imagination in how they understand and experience their new surroundings. They measure their post-migration lives against their idyllic representation(s) of the French countryside, particularly focussing on the ways in which the local population commune with one another and their surroundings. Importantly, from an early stage, their experiences taught them that the sense of community that they had been seeking existed in the Lot, as they revealed in their discussions of their neighbours:

The desire to become part of the local community is common among lifestyle migrants. However, as O'Reilly (2000) has argued in the case of the British in Spain, there is often a discrepancy between rhetoric and action when it comes to the discussion of integration; while they stress that they want to become part of the local community, their actions instead seem to be directed towards the creation of a parallel community, normally made up of their compatriots. In such circumstances, claims to integration are often exaggerated.

Among my respondents in the Lot, claims that they were becoming part of the local community were, however, more than just rhetoric; they visibly worked towards creating meaningful relationships with members of the local community, even though their efforts were not always successful. The contexts in which they developed these relationships often reinforced their imaginings of the rural idyll, as they attended the chasse (hunt) dinner, the local fěte or market, and had the opportunity to meet and get to know local social actors. They witnessed first hand the close-knit community of the Lot. Through commensality they gained opportunities to get to know local social actors, and over time, started to develop relationships with them. This was, as many of my respondents stressed, a slow and often frustrating process.

How my respondents related to the landscape was, however, more complex than this image presents. Their actions were informed not only by understandings about what life in rural France might afford them, but also by their wider imaginings and aspirations for life following migration. The context of life before migration was crucial in understanding how this was framed, with the changes in working status, the opposition between work and leisure, and position in the life course often featuring highly within it. In this respect the better way of life that the migrants sought through migration was often characterized, in part, by increased time for leisure activities such as walking, reading and playing golf. Once again, this reflects a wider discourse about the need to re-evaluate work-life balance in order to achieve a more wholesome and fulfilling way of life. For my respondents in the Lot the paramount emblem of such leisurely lives were the swimming pools that adorned their back gardens, set within locations chosen to make the most of the view. In this respect, it became clear that the migrants' various engagements were shaped by their preconceptions about what life following migration might afford.

Nevertheless, it was often the case that such different understandings of the landscape and how it should be used did not sit alongside one another comfortably. This became clear through the example of a swimming pool that was highly visible from one of the area's viewpoints. My respondents often described this particular pool as an eyesore, deemed to be out of keeping with the ‘natural’ surroundings. Built in the garden of a British resident, it stood out because of its unusual figure-of-eight shape and bright green pool liner. As the migrants explained how they had chosen the location of their own swimming pools to complement the local scenery, or hidden it from view, they drew attention to the tensions that existed between their representations of the Lot as the French rural idyll, the possibilities for leisure that their new surroundings afforded, and its visual-aesthetic value. Nevertheless, these efforts to enact wider cultural repertoires – the rural idyll, self-improvement, and the drive for a better way of life – demonstrate the role that imagination plays within the production of post-migration lives.

In many ways, the centrality of such imaginings both in the decision to migrate, and in life following migration is reminiscent of the imagination as a social practice, proposed by Arjun Appadurai. In this rendering, ‘the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility’ (Appadurai, 1996: 31). In this understanding, in the globalized world imagination is the property of the individual and underlies the multiple ways in which their everyday practices and activities are constantly ‘at work’ in how people understand and enact their lives.

As Appadurai (1996) explicitly argues, imagination inspires migration; in privileging the individual migrant, he stresses that imagination is what helps them to make sense of the possibilities around them and choose a particular route. However, Ong (1999) emphasises that there is a need to contemplate the structural conditions, and perhaps constraints, that shape the ability to act upon such an imagining. Indeed, as I highlight elsewhere, British migration to rural France is not only the result of the romantic idealization of the French countryside presented here, but is also made possible by the relative affluence of the migrants, and structural conditions such as the freedom of movement within Europe and ease of travel (Benson, 2011).

Beyond the structural context that allows migration, the examples also draw attention to the role of structure – in this case articulated as culture – in shaping the possibilities for their future lives that the migrants will consider as well as the way that they narrate these. In this respect, I argue that while it is important to understand the role of individual agency in bringing about migration, it is clear that the choice of destination and the framing of post-migration life is in part inspired by wider, collectively held imaginings. It is these that explain how my respondents in the Lot make sense of (1) their migration to rural France specifically – they were acting upon an understanding of rurality that could be recognized by their peers – and (2) their new surroundings – with their experiences interpreted through the lens of their imaginations. This understanding draws attention to the way in which what appear to be individual actions were justified through the recourse to collective imaginings. In this manner, understanding the relationship between imagination and migration also high lights the structural roots of the migrants' routes from Britain to the Lot.

Experiencing and embodying post-migration life

While it is clear that imaginings of the rural idyll shape both expectations and experiences of life in the Lot, it is also the case that through their own engagements with the landscape, my respondents gain subjective experiences of their new surroundings. These, in turn, inform their broader rhetoric of life in the Lot alongside their imaginings. In particular, working the land is perceived as an entrée into the landscape. As my respondents explain, through their various gardening and horticultural projects, they achieve a deeper knowledge of their new environments. In this respect, their accounts reflect an understanding of their relationship to the landscape premised on engagement; as they present it, in order to understand their surroundings, they have to feel the dirt beneath their fingernails (cf Theodossopoulos, 2003; Tilley, 1994, 2006a & b (in relation to gardens)).

For example, Connie and Harry Earl have a large vegetable garden, which requires a lot of care and attention. From ploughing and preparing the ground for planting, to weeding, nurturing, watering, tending, protecting, and eventually harvesting, this vegetable garden is a year-round undertaking, requiring work each day irrespective of the season. In the summer months, when most vegetables are ready to harvest, Harry and Connie could be out in the garden working for four or five hours a day. Early in the morning, before it becomes too hot, they harvest whatever is ready or needed for the day's food, as well as weeding. In the evening, they spend at least one and half hours watering the patch. As they explain, they grow their own vegetables because they taste good. I remain unsure whether they mean that they taste better than other vegetables or whether they taste better because of all the work that they have put into producing them. But there is more to it than that.

As another of my respondents, James Harvey-Browne explains, ‘you probably tend to grow your own vegetables more because you're that bit further away from the main town’, implying that in some sense, growing your own vegetables is part of rural living. This correlation is also central to the account of Martin and Sarah Johnstone, who run a chambre d'hôte (Bed and Breakfast) up on the causse (limestone plateau). They too grow many of their own vegetables and raise chickens. In the evenings, they provide their guests with a hearty rustic meal, made using home-grown vegetables, while breakfast include freshly laid eggs.

Another way that my respondents feel that they have developed a deeper understanding of their surroundings is through walking. Most villages have a rambling club, and by joining in with such activities the migrants are able to explore their surroundings alongside their neighbours, whose knowledge of the landscape has often been formed over a lifetime of living within it.

The migrants then incorporate this newly-found knowledge into their own narratives about life in the Lot. They often make short observations about the flora and fauna, for example, pointing out the strange holes in the freshly ploughed fields, stressing that this is evidence of the wild boar searching for roots to eat, or identifying the calls of the local birds. In this manner, my respondents become engaged in the landscape, imitating the ‘authentically’ local knowledge of these social actors. Furthermore, through their shared participation in the rambling club, my respondents are able to develop relationships with local French actors, which extend into their everyday lives. It seems that through walking, the migrants establish an intimate relationship with their new surroundings, characterized by a distinctive understanding, with their routes intersecting those of other inhabitants of the landscape (Lee and Ingold, 2006; Ingold and Lee Vergunst, 2008).

Through practices such as gardening and walking the migrants believed that they were able to develop a personal, interactive relationship, becoming part of the local landscape. This highlights the privileging of engagement in the migrants' accounts of their relationship with their new surroundings, and their efforts to emplace themselves within the locality. In this respect, it is clear that their accounts aimed to produce a sense – reminiscent of that proposed by Ingold (1993, 1995) that they were dwelling within the landscape. As Ingold argues (1993, 1995), through dwelling social actors become an integral part of their surroundings, building up relationships with other people, animals, and objects and gaining an intimate understanding of the landscape. In other words, a connection to the landscape through engagement results in a sense of rootedness, of localness.

Furthermore, it became clear that these activities set the stage for my respondents to become part of the local social landscape, interacting with their local French neighbours. Indeed, Martin and Sarah had stuck certificates from the village association to the fridge door, attesting to the quality of their produce; they had come first and second at the village competition for their home-grown vegetables. Their efforts in the vegetable garden evidently give them an intimate knowledge of the physical landscape, but have also resulted in their paths crossing those of other local users.

This seamless image of integration into the local landscape through engagement overlooks the persistence of imagination in shaping how the migrants understand their surroundings; in other words, it is not the case that the migrants exchange their preconceived ideals for personal experience. For example, focusing on the role of engagement in the development of a relationship with the landscape overlooks the complexity of this relationship, which often contains an element of detachment – the landscape viewed from a distance and often shape by imagination.

This contradicts Ingold's (1993, 1995) model for understanding the landscape, through which he stresses that engagement with the landscape and detachment from it are mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, it is clear that for my respondents in the Lot, both engagement and detachment characterize their relationships with the new environment, as is the case for many modern actors. Indeed, as Carrier (2003) implies, modern social actors often hold contradictory understandings of the environment that simultaneously privilege both engagement with and detachment from the landscape. Furthermore, the privileging of engagement as practice undermines the extent to which preconceived understandings of the landscape shape the very practices that evolve. In sum, the dwelling perspective privileges practice and activity over representation and a coherence in perceptions of the landscape which cannot fully account for the lived experience of my respondents (see Carrier, 2003; Cloke and Jones, 2001; Massey, 2006 for more developed critiques of Ingold's perspective).

Indeed, the migrants' actions had a history and context behind them that is frequently overlooked by the dwelling perspective. The landscape of the Lot is not a blank canvas for the migrants, and their practices and activities remain framed by their early representations of the rural French landscape. For example, examining the migrants' accounts of gardening more carefully reveals that they often conflate their efforts to engage with the landscape with those of local farmers. It was thus common to find that migrants would explain how, like their French neighbours, they had an intuitive understanding of the landscape, or they would claim that they imitated these local actors, watching how, when, and what they planted.

Although their French neighbours cultivate the land out of economic necessity, the migrants nevertheless believe they imitate the local French. Their actions, therefore, suggest a mimicry, which serves as a way of claiming a particular type of belonging. In the case of less privileged actors mimicry has been identified as a tool of the colonizers (Taussig, 1993; Bhabha, 2002) or as a way of claiming an overarching supranational identity (Ferguson, 2002). In contrast, for my respondents in the Lot, mimicry serves uniquely as a way of claiming membership of a particular locale. This clearly maps on to their ambitions for life in the Lot, which include, as Justine Grange explained, the desire ‘to be part of the village’.

As the following section demonstrates, the migrants' activities within the landscape continue to be shaped by wider cultural repertoires, even if they also account for practice. In this respect, as Cloke and Jones (2001) argue, it is necessary to account for the dynamism and interpenetrativeness of the contemporary landscape that is not permitted by Ingold's dwelling perspective. Furthermore, there is a need to examine the (messy) process through which embodied knowledge is developed, focussing particularly on the interrelationships between vicarious knowledge and social practice.

A more complex picture

The examples presented so far have extracted, on the one hand, the culturally-specific imaginings that promoted migration to rural France and the role that these continue to play in shaping the migrants' perceptions of their new surroundings. On the other hand, the ethnography demonstrates the extent to which the migrants privilege engagement with the landscape as a way of developing an intimate knowledge of their surroundings. However, closer examination of their narratives reveals a more complex picture of how they use, interpret, and relate to their new surroundings. In this respect, a model needs to be developed that broadly accounts for how culturally-specific imaginings of the rural idyll, embodied knowledge and individual experiences coalesce in the development of a relationship with the landscape.

It was clear that despite their experiences of life in the Lot, their imaginings of this place and their lives within it continued to influence their understandings of it. This was evident in the way that they talked about their lives in the Lot; as the examples in this paper have shown, they often referred to the virtues of the rural idyll and reflected on how these were a central part of their lives. However, it was also the case that they continued to value the visual beauty of their surroundings. Indeed, they recalled how this often caused them to step back from their daily lives and survey their surroundings just as they had done on their first visits to the Lot.

The complexity in the ways that my respondents experienced the landscape became clear as they recalled how their imaginings of rural life had been modified by their experiences. For example, Susan Sparrow had imagined that she would be able to make jam from her home-grown produce, but when she had returned home with her fruit trees, her neighbour had informed her that the tree would not grow in the local soil and would, therefore, not produce any fruit. While Susan, by her own admission, had stubbornly refused to accept her neighbour's advice, it soon became clear that her new trees were not faring very well. Through this experience she realized that the locals, ‘know far more than we do about living here’, in the process gaining her own embodied knowledge of how to live in the Lot. This was an experience that many of my respondents held in common with Susan. As Vic Wilson recalled, many people thought that they could grow anything in the Lot; importing their seeds from Britain, they were often surprised when they did not grow. As he explained, he had learned very quickly that the seeds that you could buy locally would produce the best results, as they were specifically cultivated to match local conditions.

It seemed that through their experiences, the migrants were able to graft their imaginings onto their new surroundings, invoking local knowledge to make the environment meaningful in their own terms. Undeniably, their sense of what constituted local knowledge was itself the product of both their romantic imaginings of rural life and their direct experiences and was often highly selective. This demonstrates the extent to which imagination and experience are inextricably intertwined.

However, it was also the case that the migrants' imaginings of the landscape could be not only in tension with one another – as outlined earlier – but also with their everyday practices. In other words, they did not always act upon their imaginings, nor was it the case that their actions reflected their accumulated embodied knowledge of how to live in the Lot. For example, despite having learned that certain vegetables that he would have grown in Britain would not grow in the Lot, and despite his previously thwarted attempts to produce a close-cut, luscious green lawn, Harry Earl persisted in striving to create the perfect lawn. Similarly, the idea of being close to nature that was part of their dreams about living in the countryside was very much at odds with other migrants' efforts to build fences that would keep the local wildlife away from their vegetable gardens.

These examples demonstrate the contradictions and complexity in the ways that the migrants imagine and perform their relationship with the landscape. The migrants' various engagements with their new surroundings reflect the three ways that people relate to the landscape as outlined by Barbara Bender (1998: 6): palimpsest, structure of feeling, and through embodiment. Bender's perspective thus allows for a landscape that undergoes continual change while maintaining the residues of past use; a landscape that has a particular learned significance for individuals, a meaning embedded in their habitus; but finally, this is also a landscape that is learned through practice and activity, as individuals, metaphorically, get their hands dirty. These different perceptions have a combined influence on the way that people relate to landscape at any particular point in time Bender (1993, 1998), with the landscape in continual process (Bender, 1993, 1998; Hirsch, 1995; Massey, 2006).

These more dynamic perspectives on understanding the landscape place both representation and practice at their centre, recognizing that these are thoroughly entangled (Bender, 1998; Cloke and Jones, 2001; Massey, 2006). In other words, perceptions of the appropriate practices and activities to carry out in the landscape may be influenced by representations and these, in turn, may be affected by lived experience. By recognizing the complex and multiple perceptions of the landscape held by individuals, it is possible to reveal the continuing co-dependence of practice and representation, engagements and detachments that are foundational to the landscape-making process. These conceptualizations of how people understand the landscape, provides a framework for exploring the migrants' relationships to their new surroundings, presenting a position that recognizes the thorough and inextricable intertwining of representation and practice, gazing and dwelling, detachment and engagement.

Concluding comments

While previous scholars have stressed that British migrants understand the French rural landscape in terms of popular cultural representations of rurality, depicted through the lens of a tourist gaze, the ethnography presented in this paper has demonstrated that following migration, such migrants have a dynamic relationship with their new surroundings that is premised, not only on their imaginings of their new surroundings, but also their everyday experiences. In this respect, over time it is clear that my respondents develop more nuanced understandings of the landscape as they strive to develop embodied knowledge of life in the Lot.

The focus on the landscape presented here reveals the way that imaginings are a central feature, not only of the decision to migrate, but also in shaping and framing experiences of life following migration. While the myth of the rural idyll has been the predominant explanation for why British people migrate to rural France, the decision to migrate, as this paper has shown, is also influenced by other imaginings that relate not only to understandings of place, but also to hopes and dreams for life following migration. In particular, imaginings of a more leisurely life and scenic representations of the landscape exist alongside the imagery of the coherent rural community. In this respect, it has become clear that the landscape may, simultaneously have multiple significance for the migrants, with these understandings of the landscape influencing and shaping their relationships and uses of their new surroundings.

Beyond this, however, there is a need to recognize the messy entanglement of experience and imagining. Neither of these alone can explain the relationship that the migrants have to their new surroundings. It is rather the case that their multi-layered understandings of the landscape emerge out of the negotiation between imagination and experience. As the examples presented in this paper have demonstrated, through this negotiation, imagination may persist unchanged, or be modified or appropriated to be made meaningful in the terms of the individual migrant. Experience may contradict imagination, creating a tension between the two, a continuing source of ambivalence in the migrants' lives.

The negotiation between imaginings and experiences, as the migrants seek to gain embodied knowledge of life in the Lot, demonstrates that relationships with the landscape continually undergo change. They are a process in which representations and practices are thoroughly intertwined (Bender, 1998; Massey, 2006). In the case of British migrants in the Lot, they are also a site for recognizing that the process of settling into life in new surroundings draws upon both imaginings and experiences, and is influenced by structural preconditions, culturally-specific imaginings, but also by subjective interpretations and experiences. Following Bourdieu's logic of practice, this is a process of embodying knowledge about how to live within a new environment, of incorporating such knowledge into the emergent and emerging embodied experience of living in the Lot. The examples presented here demonstrate the extent to which the migrants continue to reflect upon this process; it appears that life in the Lot has not yet become second nature.

It is thus the case that, over time, the migrants' accounts of life in the Lot continue to be framed around an expressed desire to become part of this landscape. Yet understandings of this landscape are themselves a moveable feast, gradually being altered by a more nuanced understanding of its history and its effect on other users; and perhaps most by the toil necessary to emplace themselves within it.

While there are times when the migrants' practices directly correspond to their representations, on closer examination, it appears that they may simultaneously represent and practise the landscape in contradictory ways. As the ethnographic examples demonstrates, they may expound the virtues of relating to the landscape through an engagement premised upon their understandings of the Lot as a rural idyll, but their accounts also tell of their regular relapses when they reduce their surroundings to its aesthetic and hedonistic qualities. It is thus the case that their perceptions of the landscape are not coherent; they change from one moment to the next, and are, in reality, continually negotiated.

Nevertheless, the contradictory perceptions that the migrants hold are not mutually exclusive: they inform and affect one another. Over time, the nuanced understanding of the landscape that the migrants gain through their own embodied experience becomes the guiding inspiration that shapes their perceptions. This reflects their belief that they have moved from being incomers to locals, making their hands dirty by working the land. However, the contradictions between their practices and representations and those of other ‘locals’ demonstrate an underlying ambiguity in their lives. In many respects, this ambiguity reflects their position as global social actors who want to become local, without completely abandoning their previous idealized perceptions of rurality. It can therefore be concluded that the British migrants living in the Lot hold, ‘different landscapes in tension’ (Bender, 1993: 2), often adopting confused criteria for judging their surroundings.