This work is centrally concerned with a group of writers - Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas and John Cowper Powys - and the ways in which they recreate actual places and landscapes imaginatively in their prose and poetry. The exploration of specific writings is set in the larger context of literary uses of place. The text examines the writings in terms of their responses to social and historical issues, but is also concerned with ways in which the writers use landscape and place to mediate a sense of the sacred, in a period of widespread loss of orthodox religious belief. The questions raised about modern ideas of nature are relevant to the ecological crisis.