ABSTRACT
To paraphrase a line from the 1999 film The Mummy: the geography of death is only the beginning. What might follow is the subject of this chapter. Though remaining at best a niche area of geographical enquiry (and pretty much unchartered territory for literary geographers), necrogeography 1 is introduced here not as a central thread of discussion or as an attempt to consolidate scholarship in this area. Rather, the geography of death – or, more precisely, a geography of death by drowning – functions as a jumping off point to explore a wider set of questions which are in themselves not intrinsic to death or mortality. If anything, the opposite is the case. It is asking what necrogeography might tell us about the symbolic worlds and spatial stories that populate the everyday landscapes of the living. How might necrogeography inform the theory and practice of mythogeography or spatial anthropology? And, in the case of liminal landscapes such as wetlands and marshlands (the topographic focus of the present study), how might a rumination on death shed insights into the symbolic geography of landscapes that are by their very nature uncertain and ambiguous, poised ‘betwixt and between’ otherwise stable topographies of place and memory? In pursuing these and other questions this chapter follows a trajectory in which the liminality of both death and landscape underpins an analytical framework which, although centred on a specific geographical location – the Dee Estuary on the north west coast of Britain (Figure 9.1) – is no less engaged with the practicalities of ‘doing’ cultural and literary mapping in the digital age. To these ends, it is necessary to start by sketching some theoretical ideas relating to what may provisionally be termed the ‘digital Aleph’.
