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Presentation long abstract

Framed as a pilgrimage along the “rugged edge of the North,” open horizons, and historic churches, the emergence of Het Ziltepad reflects a growing desire to reconnect with nature through spirituality and folklore. The path mobilizes long-standing Romantic imaginaries in which connection to the tidal landscape in constant conversation with the Wadden Sea offers spiritual restoration, authentic experiences, and moral clarity (Nash, 2014; Olwig, 1996; Cronon, 1996). Simultaneously, the pilgrim is taken through agricultural deserts, hardscaping infrastructure, and silenced histories of (natural) exploitation. The paper situates the Ziltepad within broader processes of heritage-making and commodification, embodying a tension between engineered order and imagined wilderness. This paper engages the concept of the ecological gothic (Kaell, 2023) to understand the affective side of natural experiences, such as melancholic nostalgia for wild nature, or the haunting presence of environmental loss, and untold histories. Positioned in a UNESCO-listed tidal landscape, the route brings into view the coexistence of idyllic imaginaries and ongoing ecological transformation, where agricultural intensification, climate change, and the more-than-human unsettle narratives of stability and authenticity, transgressing hegemonic binaries such as natural/unnatural, pure/impure, and past/future, evoking complex narratives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted along the route, the paper discusses how the pilgrimage becomes a site where emotional entanglements with landscape both reproduce and unsettle dominant imaginaries of nature, belonging, and the rural, while remaining entangled in longer histories of power, coloniality, and environmental transformation.