All roads lead to Briggflatts. If Bunting's great poem is ‘the song of a Modernist ‘'Viking'', plunderer of experience, who chooses freedom instead of ‘'hearth,''’ it is also the song of the poet- traveller who comes to understand, like the eighteenth-century explorer John Ledyard, the etymological overlap between ‘errant’ and ‘errob and yearns for the ‘reek of [the] hearth's scent’ and the nourishment of ‘sour rye porridge from the hob’ (CP 63). The long journey behind the poem's creation, as we have seen, creates a compelling narrative. ‘The art of reading', argues Michael Schmidt, ‘like that of writing requires perspective, establishing a certain distance from one's own language, one's own concerns, even one's own community or country [..] For Basil Bunting the distance was found in long exile - on the Continent, in contact with Yeats and Pound, with sullen diplomats and ambitious military officers in Persia - and in his pacifism during the First World War.’ Briggflatts, written in the 1960s, is, in effect, a literary nostos, a Northumbrian homecoming, what Herbert Read called ‘a poem of return […] after long sojourns in exotic lands’ (PBB 213). James McGonigal argues: ‘Here was a link not only with the great poetic generation but also with a life of restless literary wandering, Goliardic, heedless of reputation, at once disturbing and attractive.’ He continues: ‘Whereas Yeats sailed to Byzantium, so to speak, Bunting sailed back.’ He brought with him a great deal of literary cargo. Briggflatts can be seen as a form of geographical and cultural translation in which the fragments, texts and languages of a long poetic life are converted into this lifelong poem creating not only a type of elegy but, according to Edward Lucie-Smith, an elegy ‘for the poet's own life’ in which ‘the star you steer by is gone'. In part Briggflatts is an act of retrieval. ‘It is easier to die than to remember', we are told, but the poem, with its Wordsworthian spots of time, does remember, binding the sheets and indexing the volume against the poet's ruins.

The journeying forth in order to journey back, which describes the Odyssean trajectory of Bunting's Briggflatts, is a journey back to Northumbria. Donald Davie, who was zealous about Bunting's poem, was a Yorkshire poet who regarded the north of England as a litmus test for a kind of cultural authenticity.