Beating The Bounds
by Peter Urpeth
5 June 2025
Beating the Bounds is a project that aims to revive and reconstitute the old custom of physically marking the limits of local territories by walking their boundary lines. But now, this will be for personal purposes, as a way of engaging with evocative places and objects in the landscapes and built environments of our lives, and especially those of our childhood.
Beating the Bounds requires us to walk the old routes linking these places, spaces and objects, and to map those routes as new personal territories, reclaiming and renewing our relationships with places of both happiness and trauma. They are so evocative in our memories and imaginations, and we can return to these physical entities. We can reclaim, renew and return them to the present day in positive form, and in so doing, to strengthen our sense of security and safety, internal and external.
At first, in exploring this idea, I returned to and walked the familiar roads of my childhood, connecting homes and other houses in which I experienced joy, but also those in which I knew extreme trauma and loss. I mapped these journeys using a fitness tracker, and those maps form the guides to the boundaries I now maintain.
These maps are themselves images, totems of the self manifest in the landscape. I have two of them - one (map A) is a map of the safe and happy places. The other, (map B) is a map of deep trauma.
The short film I subsequently made of these journeys - Essex Man Prepares for Death - represents a walk that is both a starting and a finishing point, that combines segments of both maps. The places of childhood happiness are first connected, but then I take an uncompleted journey towards a house of deep trauma. I cannot do it, and that failure marks the limit of this journey. In making this film, in undertaking this walk, I had to retreat from visiting that space of trauma, and instead I returned to my happiest home.
I wanted in this film, and in these walks, to explore if this method would also act to reclaim those spaces, to confront the trauma, and free my memory and imagination from their negative evocations. My conclusion is that this Beating of the Bounds was overwhelmingly successful in its aim, despite its truncation.
I think the ambiguity in the title - Beating The Bounds - is also clear here. There is ‘beating’ as in marking, but also ‘beating’ as in overcoming, with the bounds being physical geographical spaces but also psychological sense of those places.
This film features the text of a poem - Essex Man (Prepares for Death) - I wrote that made this project alive in my mind. In this film, I am use my ‘A’ map of safe spaces as the outline for a journey into my own ageing, my sense of mortality. But also to explore us as ephemera in the landscape, how our ordinary lives leave behind little in the places we inhabited, but which to us our totemic in their force in our lives. The poem details my attempts to connect these two realities through a series of actions, and with the guidance of other entities.
The railway bridge used in this film, with its many steps, was a place of fear when i was young, and it was the route that connects the two maps, the two journeys I mapped on the first trip back in August 2024.
This project grew out of the movement lock downs imposed during the first wave of Covid 19 responses in the UK. My idea was that people feeling traumatised or trapped by the travel restrictions could take a map and with a compass draw a circle marking the maximum legal distance they could travel, and then they could walk that boundary line, generating a much bigger and longer walk if done in its entirety fully. This I thought might help strengthen the sense of identity that many felt they lost during lockdown, and the sense of a safe zone, in which they were free from harm.
But that modest idea soon grew in my imagination to encompass all senses of our personal safety in relation to the environments in which we have lived. So many of us feel that we cannot revisit the places we once lived, or which hold particular memories for us, and I wanted to cross those boundaries of the self and explore the results of that journeying.
The other encounter that inspired these ideas was with John Clare’s journal ‘Recollections of Journey from Essex.’
In that work, over a three / four day period, Clare walked away from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest that had been his home for a number of years, back to his home to be with his first wife, Mary.
That journey saw him sleep under trees and in hedgerows, and was marked by the hardships of starvation and exhaustion. He made it back, but only to have the rumour as he called it that Mary had died six years before, confirmed to him. His journal is a travel back into his own past, to a place he knew, or thought he knew. And also, that when he arrived he was shocked by the impact of the Enclosure Acts on that landscape, shutting off the open spaces of the countryside as he remembered them, and shutting off the landscapes of his childhood.
The powerful link between walking, our self-identities, our psychological engagement with the evocative spaces of our lives, has many such examples. But Clare’s struck me with its powers.
I aim to produce a practical guide to this process, a pamphlet as to how this method can be used, and with comment and interpretation from others, academic, creatively and so on.
For this project, I was very fortunate to secure an artists’ bursary from An lanntair for the initial work. With that, I travelled back to the places in which I lived when young, at key moments, and walked between these homes, and homes from home, and this film grew from that journeying.