In ‘Species of Spaces’ the writer George Perec describes the complexities of articulating spatial experience as a form of conquest (Perec 1977). The act of drawing in or from the landscape, where materials witness site as a mirror to nature, provide the kind of speculative encounter that Perec may have been alluding to. In this sense, the materiality of drawing has the ability to expand our relational understanding of the world around us. This text explores two such encounters made through the author’s own drawings, in response to diametrically opposed sites in the east and west of England. In both works discussed, the process of making centres on the fusion of photographic image with raw drawing matter (such as charcoal dust or agricultural lime), either adhered directly onto the surface of the picture plane or invested into the fabric of the paper surface through absorption.