Remains of Elmet (1979) was written as a poetic sequence in response to Fay Godwin’s black and white photographs of the Calder Valley landscape, a region that shaped Ted Hughes’s childhood. The collection meditates on the decline of industry and the remnants of the past, tracing the area’s history from the ancient Celtic kingdom of Elmet to the industrial landscape of the Calder Valley in the present. In keeping with the theme of this volume, Hughes’s “space in transit” is built around the landscape and people of the Calder Valley, the place of Hughes’s birth and early childhood memories. As a collection it reads largely as a social, political, religious and historical poetic tapestry of sorts, where the poet explores the influences of the Industrial Revolution and war on both the land and its people, while addressing the tensions between culture and nature. My analysis explores the powerful link between Hughes’s memories of his Yorkshire childhood world and how they shaped his imaginative universe together with his deep sense of place in response to the environment. Drawing on Lawrence Buell’s concept of “environmental memory” (2017) and Astrid Erll’s definition of “cultural memory” (2010), I examine how Remains of Elmet functions as a rich archive of both personal and collective memories. Through themes of place, environment and memory, I explore Hughes’s environmental critique of industry, war and religion, demonstrating how the poems reveal landscape in ways that reflect the complex interplay between external nature and human culture, ultimately positioning the collection as a call to rethink how we inhabit the earth, enacting an ecological recovery and a wake-up call to preserve nature.