6/3/2023 0 Comments Glastonbury tor walk![]() With this background in mind, in this article we consider how the contemporary navigational resources of mobile devices with GPS, and the resources of countryside landscape features, are brought together in visiting a tourist site. Looking at the challenges of wayfinding with new mobile devices helps inform the development of digital mapping tools for navigating through difficult terrain. ![]() Resources made available through the digital map app change, but do not replace, the skills of 'ordinary wayfinding'. The claim is that the production of an incarnate subjectivity within practices of ascension may be understood in the context of an ontology of visibility which both accounts for, and problematises, the distinction of seer and seen. The account of ascending Glastonbury Tor presented here may be regarded as an attempt to explore and exemplify this position. Following Merleau-Ponty, I argue that ascension and elevation are amenable to description as enlacements of self and landscape, as intertwinings of vision and the visible. I then advocate the writings of Merleau-Ponty as offering a sustained antidote to the binarism of subject and object, seer and seen, which is central to such models of knowing. Ventoux in France serves as a point of entry into the links between an `elevated' view and Cartesian spectatorial epistemologies. After briefly outlining Glastonbury's complex cultural histories, the well-known story of Francesco Petrarch's ascent of Mt. ![]() ![]() Aiming to abet but also inflect interpretation of the contemporary and historical cultural significance of hill-climbing, the paper uses the ascent of the Tor as a means of illustrating the possibility of writing otherwise the ontological and epistemological motifs commonly associated with practices of ascension and elevation. This paper offers a personal account of ascending Glastonbury Tor, a prominent hill in Somerset, south-west England.
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