Leave only footprints? How traces of movement shape the appropriation of space

The tracks people leave behind in the landscape are more than mere imprints on the ground. They are traces that can work to shape peoples' claims to particular spaces, both materially and semiotically. This article examines the ways in which such mark-making is caught up in contestations over the legitimate use of spaces deemed wild' and natural'. It draws upon a mobile and video ethnographic study of walkers and mountain bikers in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, to explore how the marks made on the ground through outdoor recreation become caught up in struggles over appropriate ways to move one's body in nature. Here, a process of informal zoning is identified whereby walkers belong in mountains but mountain bikers do not. Emerging from the analysis are the ways in which footprints and tyre-tracks are constituted and contested as damage' in relation to mountain spaces, and thus used to ascribe or distance culpability from different modes of mobility: walking versus cycling. Particular attention is paid to how such configurations serve as the grounds for excluding certain recreational users from particular outdoor spaces. This article thus identifies traces of movement, and the ways in which they are rendered visible' or natural' in talk, action and terrain, as key territorialising devices. In particular, a social and cultural treatment of the environmental impacts of outdoor recreation highlights how absence, as well as presence, of traces can be a powerful device for staking claims to space. The analysis also prompts a greater appreciation of the role of surfaces in constituting particular natures (such as mountains) as natural and wild, and how particular subjects, ways of moving and technologies are implicated, (de)naturalised and disciplined therein.