Ronald Lockley and the Archipelagic Imagination

Ronald Lockley (1903–2000), distinguished naturalist, pioneering conservationist, author in multiple genres, and paradigmatic modern ‘island dweller’, played a crucial role in defining our sense of Welsh and wider archipelagic ‘islandness’. Drawing on ‘nissology’—a dynamic ‘research frontier’ that brings together the arts, sciences, and social sciences to scrutinize not only islands ‘in their own terms’, but also the complex cultural condition of islandness—this chapter offers an analysis of how Welsh island space is mediated through Lockley’s plethora of discourses, from autobiographical narratives of island existence to definitive field studies and scientific papers, to works of popular anthropology, social history, and the novel Seal Woman (1974). It demonstrates how Lockley’s construction of a series of relational Welsh identities is linked to wider British and global archipelagic locations of culture.