TRACING LINES IN THE HILBRE SANDS: A SPATIAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF ISLANDNESS AND OTHER FICTIONS

Abstract

 The Hilbre Islands are an archipelago of three small islands in the Dee Estuary at the border between Wales and England. Hilbre has long played host to myths, legends and spatial stories that speak to questions of identity, mobility and the betwixt-and-betweenness of place and cultural belonging. Travel to and from the islands today is still undertaken on foot, with navigation across the sands possible at low tide. Approached and conceived as a negative space, it is the social, cultural and spatial practices that are constitutive of Hilbre’s very particular form of islandness that this paper sets out to explore.