“We both look, but we see differently.” History, Landscape and Eighteenth-Century Folk in Alan Garner’s Thursbitch (2003)

Alan Garner’s Thursbitch (2003) represents landscape as a threshold for emotional encounters with the past in a way which aligns with eighteenth-century Graveyard poetry’s preoccupation with memory, loss, and posterity. By juxtaposing fragmented narratives of John Turner, an eighteenth-century salt jagger, with modern characters Sal and Ian, Garner’s novel exposes the limits of historiography and the imaginative possibilities of fabulation. This chapter argues that Thursbitch invites readers to feel the past rather than know it, engaging landscapes as sites of emotional resonance rather than recovered truths. It reads Garner’s novel alongside Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,’ demonstrating that both texts foreground the unknowability of the past while insisting on empathetic imagination toward lost lives. The essay contends that Garner’s fabulation, paired with eighteenth-century poetic concerns, positions Thursbitch as a work of historiographic metafiction, using landscapes as a means of reflecting on transience, memory, and history. Ultimately, Thursbitch does not resurrect the past but emphasises its unknowability.