The Faber poet Norman Nicholson (1914–87) spent all but twenty months of his life at 14 St George's Terrace, Millom: a three-storey terraced house located at the centre of this iron-mining community on the Cumbrian coast. Unsurprisingly, his poetry repeatedly reflects upon the palimpsestic layering of loco-specific memories generated by ‘a lifetime spent in that same town’; and he was thereby practising a form of ‘deep mapping’ long before that label was given cultural currency by the American literary cartographer William Least Heat-Moon. As with Heat-Moon, author of PrairyErth (1991), Nicholson draws upon a personal commitment to place in order to construct a ‘thick’ textual map, a body of landscape writing which is predicated upon the impulse to ‘know more and more’ about a circumscribed geographical space. It would be reductive, however, to suggest that Nicholson's poetry of place is exclusively characterised by a Heideggerian valorisation of being and dwelling, locatedness and at-homeness. Rather, as with Heat-Moon, Nicholson's writing about place continually fluctuates between images of stillness and restlessness, surface and depth. It is a conflicted position which is symbolised by the dozens of guillemots which Nicholson says ‘rest// Restlessly’ in ‘clefts of the cliff’ between ‘Fleswick and St Bees North Head’ on the Cumbria coast, with the enjambment across stanzas underscoring how images of stillness are only ever momentary pauses in his work. The dialectical feelings and forces which inform, and destabilise, Nicholson's poetic portrait of Millom can be similarly traced in his imaginative engagement with the uplands (and, to a lesser extent, the waters) of the English Lake District. According to John Wylie, landscapes are defined and ‘animated’ by a concatenation of ‘tensions’ which have ‘proved enduringly creative and productive for cultural geographers and other interpreting and writing about landscape’. Wylie then goes on to identify and summarise four cardinal tensions: proximity and distance; observation and inhabitation; eye and land; and, inevitably, culture and nature. This chapter examines how such tensions are integral to Nicholson's interrogation of ways of seeing the Cumbrian topography, and it illustrates the painterly way in which, in Nicholson's poetry of space and place, the eye of the perceiving subject tirelessly moves in, around and across the material landscape.