Retracing Trevelyan? Historical Practice and the Archive of the Feet

This essay explores current debates in the discipline of history, asking how and why an outdoors praxis – the archive of the feet – has found a new role at a moment when historians seek useful ways of contributing to ecological and posthumanist agendas. The paper looks back to the work of G.M. Trevelyan, with whom the idea of practiscing history on foot is inextricably associated, asking how his equivocal example might inform current practice. In exploring the possibilities of movement for provoking imaginative engagement with past lifeways, the paper introduces a current project to write a history of the British and Irish archipelago from the perspective of its Atlantic coasts; this involves travelling all these coasts by kayak and on foot in 2016-17.