Landscape, imagination and experience: processes of emplacement among the British in rural France

This paper traces the process by which the British residents of the Lot, a department in rural France, develop a deeper understanding of their new surroundings. While their initial perceptions of the landscape as providing a beautiful view and a backdrop to their everyday lives prompted their migration, once they are living in the French countryside these perceptions subtly change in response to their experiences of life there. As I argue, it is not simply the case that their initial impressions are replaced with the knowledge gained from their embodied experiences. Indeed, it becomes clear that their idealizations of rural living continue to frame, partially, their understandings of how really to live in rural France; through valorization and imitation of the lives and practices of their French neighbours my respondents lay claim to local belonging. The paper thus demonstrates the ways that imaginings and experience coalesce in the production of a continually renewed understanding of their new location