This is a study of people, place, and cultural "identity" in two small parishes that are geographically on the periphery of the United Kingdom. Both are coastal parishes: one is in South-west Wales overlooking the Irish Sea and the other is one of the islands comprising The Orkney archipelago.' This is also a work of marginal anthropology (Fox, 1975) that discusses both conventional and more experimental "ways of telling" in an attempt to interpret human social behaviour.