51 The midlands are often over-looked or written out of place-making initiatives that seek to make selected towns and cities (and routes such as the Wild Atlantic Way) more competitive and better branded to boost tourist and visitor numbers. Yet, conversations with Townscape participants shows the rich and textured way in which people weave the landscape, history and local heritage into their local sense of the townscape. This reveals a powerful “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1973) that is central to creating an authentic sense of place and territorial identity in Stradbally. Community in Stradbally The process of becoming attached to place is not solely generated through sentimental orientations to history, nature and heritage. Rather it is also grounded in associational life. The existence of associational life in the form of interactions, personal relations and institutional practices at the level of locality are crucial to place attachment, (Simonen, 1997: 172). Furthermore, the existence of community voluntary associations are significant not only as integrating mechanisms that cover a range of fields of activity, but because ‘they harbour ‘memory traces’ through which something like a social structure can transpose itself from one time or institutional realm to the next,’ (Molotch et al., 2000: 794). The conversations we had with the participants in Townscape bear out Rustin’s argument that much of human experience does not transcend but rather continues to be bound by time and space constraints. “Even though mobility and choice of place has grown, territorial locations remain nodes of association and continuity, bounding cultures and communities” (quoted in Robins, 1993: 310). Most of our espondents were born and bred either in Stradbally or within a short radius of the town. They could trace their families back through multiple generations. Most had an extended network of family (adult children, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and so on) living near or in the locality with whom they were in regular contact: Generations [of our family are] from Stradbally, lived here, never lived anywhere else. …My mum’s family would have been from Stradbally, my father’s from the next parish over. My husband lived outside of the town. We grew up as friends and neighbours. For some participants- particularly those who have no family connection in Stradbally- that strong sense of connectedness may be perceived as somewhat exclusionary: