Peter Riley is a poet deeply engaged with the poetics of place, producing representations of landscape that are at once learned, reflexive and rich with the details of sensuous experience. Walking frequently serves his narrators as a means of phenomenological immersion and performative enactment, though a dense weight of research into the history, geography and geology of his chosen loci is discernible between or behind the lines, as are a profusion of playful intertextual dialogues. Specific places provide both creative impetus and a thematic focal point in texts from across Riley's large and diverse oeuvre; as Simon Perril remarks, his poetry ‘has rigourously anchored itself in place and landscape’. For instance, the sequence Sea Watches (1991) is set almost entirely on the Llŷn Peninsula in north-west Wales – as are a number of related poems – and is accompanied by detailed ‘Topographical Notes’ explaining the historical, cultural, religious and personal significance of places depicted in the poem. Another sequence, Noon Province, unfolds among the villages, hillsides and field margins of Provence, southern France, while other poems from the collection A Map of Faring (2005) are prompted by locations in Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy and Spain. By far the most important cluster of places with which Riley's poetry engages, however, is to be found in the Peak District and its surrounding edgelands, where Riley lived for more than ten years in the 1970s and 1980s. In this essay I want to offer a detailed reading of his long poem Alstonefield (2003), in which the writing of place is pursued through the familiar trope of walking in the landscape. I will examine how the dynamics of settlement and locomotion in Riley's text inform its digressive reflection on the place-bound character of lyric subjectivity, which in turn opens on to a critical dialogue with the conventions and legacies of the pastoral mode. Eric Falci argues that Riley's ‘continuing series of Midland and Northern topographies […] may end up constituting the most significant engagement with location and landscape in twentieth-century British poetry’. It is not my intention to prove or disprove the validity of this claim, which is in any case deliberately hedged in the conditional tense.